Do you approve or disapprove of the way that Douglas MacArthur is handling his job as president?

  • Approve

    Votes: 199 72.6%
  • Disapprove

    Votes: 75 27.4%

  • Total voters
    274
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Part III, Chapter 21
  • CHAPTER 21

    So but now with Tanks a'clatter
    Have I waddled on the foe
    Belching death at twenty paces,
    By the star shell's ghastly glow.

    November 19, 1950


    Fighters from the Leyte screamed overhead. The sea was choppy and unfriendly. Something up on the beach was burning, in spite of the snow on the ground and the freezing weather. Brigadier General Lewis B. Puller missed the sounds of guns going off – this fleet included a pair of cruisers – but unfortunately this wasn’t a real invasion. Iwon had been friendly territory for a while, but the damned Chinese had made a habit of appearing where they weren’t supposed to be. The 1st Marine Division, his command since General Smith got himself shot in Pyongyang, had one standing order. “Be ready for anything, at any time and any place.”
    Some of the troops would be unloading from transport ships in Iwon’s small port. Others, including most of the Marines, were going to be dropped on the beach by LVTs. Patton had made it clear he wanted as many men as possible in Iwon within twenty-four hours, and he didn’t care how it happened. If it made the invasion look like a complete shambles, well didn’t they all?
    The LVT’s ramp crashed down onto the snow-covered sand. Puller knew what this meant. “Let’s go men!” he called out. “We don’t want Patton’s boys beating us to the Yalu after all!”
    As the men clambered on to the beach, he heard the sound of a jeep coming to a stop. “It appears I already have! At least as far as the beaches. Hello, Chesty.” Patton said with an obvious smirk.
    After they exchanged salutes, Puller decided to steal one of Patton’s favourite greetings. “Where the hell have you been?” he asked.
    “Defending.” Patton replied sarcastically. “I don’t imagine Japan was any more glorious.”
    “Sir, the Marine Corps’ purpose is to fight. Sitting around Japan is a waste of our talent.” Puller said. “Find us some communists to shoot, sir, and the word ‘Marine’ will become another word for fear in the Chinese language.”
    “I thought my name was going to take that spot.” Patton joked. “But there’s plenty of the sons of bitches for us to shoot. Take your guys up to Pungsan, about forty miles that way.” he pointed to the northwest. “In the last war I marched my men a hundred miles in two days before sending them straight into action against the Huns. You tell the Marines that. It’ll inspire them.”
    “Sir, they already know about it.” Puller replied. “They told me they’ll do this trip in less than half the time, mountains and weather be damned.”
    “Then I suppose I’ll see you again on the Yalu. Make the river run red with the blood of our enemies!” Patton said, before getting back in the jeep and driving off to the east. The 7th Division had begun unloading an hour ago, but the Marines were fast catching up.
    He turned to his men again. “Some of you might have just heard me talking with the general. We’re heading for Pungsan. And if we’re going to beat Patton at moving men, we’ll be there by 1100 tomorrow morning.” That was a little under nineteen hours away. “So let’s show the Army what Marines can do!”

    ***

    November 21, 1950

    Major Harry Fleming crouched in the ruins of a building in Toksil. He didn’t bother digging a foxhole. Patton’s borderline obsession with not digging them had nothing to do with it: in the ROK army his words were ignored at the best of times. Here, high up in the mountains, the ground was frozen solid. The temperature hovered around twenty below, and winter was still technically a month off. Digging in was impossible. Not that it would have made much difference anyway: a blind Chinaman could have found him. The regiment’s gasoline rations were being used to keep men warm, and his nearby fire was no exception. The tanks they were supposed to be fuelling had been left behind near the Chosin Reservoir. Those things were useless in the mountains.
    A burst from a PPSh, or some other similar weapon, told him the communists were nearby. That wasn’t too surprising: Toksil was totally surrounded. Colonel Lim had received orders that amounted to ‘circle the wagons’ and to wait for help. Fleming knew that better than anyone in the 7th Regiment, or even in the 6th ROK Division. He’d heard them directly from General Coulter, who seemed to be Patton’s more diplomatic representative for commanding the Korean troops. He’d passed them on to Lim himself.
    He used a broken mirror (taken from the bathroom in another Korean house last night) to peer over the crumbling walls. No Chinese were in sight. They hardly ever were. Even compared to the North Koreans, the Chinese were experts at camouflage.
    Just in case, he poked his Garand over the wall and shot two rounds off into the mountains. He didn’t know if he hit anything: it was more to make the Chinese keep their heads down than anything. Then a shriek from that direction suggested maybe he had hit someone. To be sure, he fired once more, before scrambling into the next house along. The Chinese didn’t have much proper artillery (not that you’d be able to use it in this terrain), but they had almost as many mortars as they did rifles or PPShs. Those awful things were a big part of the reason Toksil was in ruins.
    A Korean private came running up to him. In not-so-good English, he said “Colonel Lim, at command tent. Now.”
    “Thank you.” Fleming replied in Korean – as long as the discussion was about military matters, he knew enough of the language to talk with his allies. It was one of the reasons he had this job and not some post with Patton’s army further south.

    Colonel Lim Bu Taik, on the other hand, had never revealed whether he spoke any English at all. He might not have, plenty of Koreans didn’t (that had had some unfortunate consequences in 1945, when the first round of American occupiers were forced into using hated Japanese as a common language). Or he might have just been stubborn and very good at hiding his skills.
    As a short mortar bombardment shelled a nearby block of ruins, Colonel Lim asked “where are the Americans” in his native tongue.
    “I do not know exactly, sir.” Fleming replied. “I only know what I’ve told you before, Patton is driving north as quickly as he can.”
    “It needs to be soon.” Colonel Lim said grumpily. “I knew it was a bad idea hiding up in here. Your Patton is using us as bait. We die and then he takes the glory of killing Chinese all for himself.”
    Fleming knew that a lot of Koreans agreed with that feeling. Patton had been unpopular with the Koreans since the day he shot that mule. Still, he had to at least convince the colonel to hold out. “Sir, Patton is a talented and experienced general. He is ordering us to hold out here because he believes it will better serve the Republic of Korea than a retreat would have.”
    “Hold out with what?” Lim said. Then angrily, he repeated himself. “Hold out with what? Our supplies are running out and there’s a million Chinese out there!”
    “Just how many supplies do we have?” Fleming asked. He knew the regiment would not lack for food, as a significant store of pre-cooked rice was found when the town was occupied. Everything else was being used up much more quickly than had been anticipated. This Chinese attack was relentless.
    “Twenty percent.” Lim said. “Enough until the sunset. Then we fight only with knives.”
    “I’ll ask General Coulter where the troops are at.” Fleming said, but before he could pick up the phone, he heard a familiar bangbangbang sound that could not have come from either the Koreans’ Garands or any of the weapons the Chinese were known to use.
    “Those are grease guns!” he exclaimed. Then, switching back to Korean, he said “sir, I think the help has arrived.”

    ***

    November 22, 1950

    “King Kong is gone.” Oscar Koch announced. “Dead or replaced, I don’t know, but he’s gone.”
    Eighth Army headquarters fell silent. Kang Kon had been the North Koreans’ top commander. Patton had called him ‘their Rommel’ a few times, and while he hadn’t been nearly so successful as Rommel, the bastard had no doubt been a tough opponent.
    “How do you know?” Patton asked. “I don’t imagine they announced his replacement over the radio.”
    “In a way, they did.” Koch replied. “Our signals units north of Toksil have intercepted a number of messages attempting to organise the remnants of the NKPA. Every one of them is signed Kim Chaek. He either commanded a division or corps before this, but seeing as we also got a message north of Pungsan and another near Onjong, it is unlikely he’s just got a corps.”
    “They announced the name of the commander over the radio?” Patton was surprised by that. Ike had thought Third Army had poor radio discipline! “You don’t think these are dummy messages meant to trick us?”
    “What would they have to gain from it?” Koch asked. “The NKPA is at best a broken shell. They haven’t offered effective resistance in six weeks. Telling us that they’ve got a new commander doesn’t change anything about that.”
    “They could be trying to make us overconfident so that we walk into a trap?” Patton proposed. “The damned Hun Chinese just did that to the ROKs.”
    “Could be,” Koch agreed. “but unlikely in my opinion. Besides, the B-29s raided Kanggye a couple of days ago. My guess is, Stratemeyer got him.”
    Raided, Patton knew, was a very tame term. He’d seen some of the photos, there wasn’t a whole lot of town left. Undoubtedly, the North Korean government was operating from either a cave or some sort of bunker these days. Rhee’s partisan hunters had uncovered several PPSh factories hidden in mountain caves further south, untouchable by air. Kim Il-sung had to have one just like it.
    “I want to capture that son of a bitch.” Patton said.
    “Kim Chaek?” Koch asked.
    “The dictator bastard.” Patton corrected him. “He’s going to go crying back to Moscow soon, there’s nowhere left in this dump of a country for him to hide, so we ought to capture him before he has a chance to. Then what we do is, when we reach the Yalu, I’ll stand him up there on the edge of the ice somewhere, and I’ll stare into his eyes as I put a bullet right between them. Then, once the corpse has fallen into the river, I’ll piss in it.”
    Koch just ignored Patton’s grand statement about pissing in the river. For one, the river was frozen solid at this time of year, so there probably wasn’t any ‘edge of the ice’ where he could do what he described. For another, he said that he would piss in the river at least once a day now, and was getting increasingly creative about how he would do so. In five minutes, he would forget he ever made this particular statement, so Koch was glad when Colonel Landrum came in and changed the subject.

    “Sir, reports from the front.” Landrum said. “In the west, we control both banks of the Kuryong River near Onjong.”
    “Is it bridged?” Patton asked.
    “Frozen over.” Landrum replied. “General Gay reports continued heavy resistance on the east bank, but believes we should be able to push forward in strength soon.”
    Patton swore under his breath. The American reaction to the Chinese second offensive had been intended as three lances piercing the flesh of the enemy, the same way that English lance had gone through his guts at Crecy. Instead, the western force had run straight into a wall of Chinese soldiers. The UN forces now held an advantage there, but it was slim.
    “What else?” Patton asked.
    “In the east, Puller and the Marines report a breakthrough northwest of Pungsan. The Chinese troops there have been routed.” Landrum said triumphantly.

    - BNC
     
    Part III, Chapter 22
  • CHAPTER 22

    So as through a glass, and darkly
    The age long strife I see
    Where I fought in many guises,
    Many names, but always me.

    November 23, 1950


    “My God!” one Marine called out. “It’s turkey!”
    “Course it’s turkey, you nimwit. It’s Thanksgiving today.” his buddy replied.

    Brigadier General ‘Chesty’ Puller had heard at least a hundred versions of that exchange throughout the day. Someone higher up, possibly Patton or MacArthur, or perhaps an officer in Washington, had decided that every soldier in Korea would get a turkey ration for Thanksgiving. The logistics of the effort had been a mess, and not everyone would get the special ration today (though Patton promised that more would arrive through the weekend). He expected they would be thankful for it even if it came three days late.
    They had pushed as far north as Sangni, not much more than twenty miles from the Yalu. The one decent road in the area was mediocre even by Korean standards, but in this terrain neither side strayed far from it. The valley it crossed was a mile above sea level, the nearby mountains could reach half that again. The mercury had reached forty below a time or two, enough to freeze your face off in a few minutes if you weren’t careful. The Chinese were tough, tough bastards, but these trackless wastes could be too much even for them. A lot of men who strayed from the road simply vanished in the mountains. The Chinese who came back would be trouble, so he kept one of his regiments ten or fifteen miles behind the rest of the advance.
    One thing was for sure though, the Chinese had not expected an entire American corps to attack in this sector. The ROKs hadn’t even sent a full division in this area, and the Chinese had barely matched them. It hadn’t taken a whole lot more for the Marines to rout them.
    Unfortunately, not all routs lasted forever.

    The Chinese counterattack began as the evening twilight turned to night. Many Marines had moved into the mountains just off the sides of the road, careful not to stray too far and find themselves lost in the wilderness. Their positions were visible in spite of the terrain: fires burning to keep men warm were fires that the enemy could attempt to capture.
    Puller fixed his bayonet to his rifle. A star shell burst above them. Beyond this position lay the Yalu River, and that meant victory. With men as good as these, Puller was confident of victory. All the Chinamen in the world couldn’t stop a division of Marines from going wherever the hell they wanted, and they wanted to go north.

    ***

    November 25, 1950

    Second Lieutenant Carl Dodd had served seven years in the Army. For nearly all of that time, it had been a fulfilling and rewarding experience (so rewarding, in fact, that he had been given a battlefield commission and could now call himself an officer). Right now, as this halftrack carried his squad towards Onjong in western North Korea, he wished he had picked a different career path. His home state of Kentucky occasionally got snow. It certainly didn’t get anything like this. There was a kid from Idaho in the squad. When he said that it was “bloody goddamn cold”, you could bet your life’s savings that you were in for a miserable time.
    As the halftrack jolted on one of the bumps on this lousy road, the captain tried standing up as a way of getting the troops’ attention. When he almost fell out the side, he gave up on that and sat back down.
    “Men, remember that you’re going into one of the roughest battlefields in Korea. The 34th Regiment has run into a bit of trouble with the Red Chinese just past Onjong, so they’re sending us in to help out. Our orders are to attack as soon as we reach the front, take some of the pressure off.” The captain said. “Remember, we’re less than fifty miles from the Chinese border. A win here, and we’ll be just a short step away from winning the war.”
    Dodd took the opportunity to finish a tin of C-rations. They didn’t taste very good: even after spending two or three hours in the pocket of his winter coat, and that coat covered by his other coat, they still felt like they came straight out of the icebox. Then he threw the tin behind his back. Some of the guys in the squad kept them: if you lit a bunch of leaves with a Zippo and stuffed them in there, you could have yourself a miniature fireplace. Seeing as he was about to go into battle, he wasn’t too keen about having extra things to carry.
    The halftrack rattled through the town of Onjong, which looked like hell. Then it drove over the frozen river, where a team of engineers were building a proper bridge to replace the one the communists (or American bombers) had wrecked. Two miles further up the road, the driver called out. “Here’s where I’ve been told to drop you. The front’s about eight hundred yards further up. Stay safe!”

    Dodd, and the rest of the men, jumped out of the halftrack and onto the snow-covered ground. For a moment he worried that the squad might leave a track with their footprints, but the wind was blowing like hell and the little bit of snow that was falling would cover them before too long. Nothing to worry about.
    Well, almost nothing. This forested hill or mountain or whatever it was… was too quiet. If it was a half mile or less from the front, he expected to be hearing the constant chatter of small-arms fire at the very least. This was eerie.
    “Get down!” he ordered, quietly, his squad. “Stay close to the trees too.”
    That kid from Idaho – still as green as grass – began to say something. “Sir…?”
    “Shut it!” Dodd snapped, no louder than before.
    Too late. From somewhere in the forest, a dozen or more communist weapons barked. He pointed his Garand in the direction of the fire, and pulled the trigger. It didn’t fire. Something in it had jammed. As quickly as he could, he pulled it back and began to strip the gun. He noticed the firing mechanism had frozen solid. He looked up to see a Chinaman pointing his bayonet straight at his guts.

    ***

    November 29, 1950

    This was it. The Yalu River. That ages-old, mighty barrier between nations, was now a barrier between the UN forces and those of the communists. Here, just off the outskirts of Hyesanjin, that was quite literally the case. Further west, especially west of the Chosin Reservoir, Patton knew there were still a lot of Chinese in the way. Oscar Koch had revised his estimate of the Chinese strength up to 300,000, and just about all of them had struck in that flatter, western part of the country. Eighth Army had struck back, and was on the move if only slowly. He was confident they would push the remaining forty miles or so before Christmas. Syngman Rhee would never receive a card from the general, but if things went well the bastard might receive a united country as a gift this year. The very thought of giving that son of a bitch anything for Christmas made Patton consider dragging out I Corps’ offensive until December 26 just to spite him.
    For now, Chesty Puller’s Marines had become the first unit, Korean or American, to reach the Yalu. Here, the oft-discussed river was a pathetic little thing. If you stood on the south bank, you could almost piss across the ice into Red China. Had the weather been better, he would have pissed in the river itself, just like he had the Seine and the Rhine. It wouldn’t be practical to do that today, and he wasn’t interested in waiting around until the spring thaw to try it. If he was still in Asia in the following March, he wouldn’t be in Korea any more. Red China needed to be purged of communist influence just as their puppet state had.
    Patton had also expected MacArthur to come here today. MacArthur hardly ever travelled to Korea, and he never stayed for any length of time when he did, but he made a habit of being seen whenever a victory was won. He’d come to Taejon. He’d come to Seoul. He’d come to Pyongyang. He said he would come for the North Koreans’ surrender. Today, Hickey had explained, MacArthur had some important meeting with a prominent Japanese leader, trying to get things ready for Japan’s independence. Instead, he had sent some camera crews and reporters with orders to announce the United Nations’ triumph to the world. The Chinese hadn’t been seen in these parts since Chesty pushed them over the river. Technically this was the front line, but the enemy was nowhere to be seen. If they were out here, Patton just hoped they were a good shot. Maybe his death would convince that coward Truman to actually do something about Red China.
    For now, he had a speech to give, standing at the edge of the south bank. He had wanted to give the speech standing in the middle of the river, but the people in charge of setting up microphones and cameras refused to get any closer to what was still supposed to be a battlefield. Oh well, the show would go on.

    “Today, a man on my staff informed me that I may be the first general in history to fight four different wars, on four different continents, and to win them all. Even Alexander only managed three. I am often asked why this has become the case, and every time this is asked I give the same answer. Our men. Not the tanks, not the planes, not the bombs, it is always the men that get things done. The brave men that make up our Army, our Navy, our Marines, our Air Force, and of course the International Brigades that have given their support to the cause of the United Nations, it is because of them that I can stand here today on the Yalu River. I say ‘thank you’, but more to the point I say ‘good job’.
    “When I say ‘good job’, that does not mean that the job is done. Not at all. There is a job out there still to be done, and it seems to me that an awful lot of sons of bitches out there have forgotten what the hell we’re actually doing out here. This war is not six months old. It has been going for the last thirty-three years, ever since those destroyers sailed into Petrograd and the bastards inside began calling for world revolution. Anyone who speaks of the ‘Korean War’ has forgotten our enemy’s intentions. Their war is not cold, or Korean, or whatever words are used to describe it by the yellow bastards who think these people can be reasoned with. Their war is perennial. Today they hide behind a curtain of iron, but we have seen already that they will stick their hands out and stab us at any opportunity.
    “We fought the Revolutionary War for the cause of the rights of man. We fought the Civil War to bring about the end of slavery. The Huns on the other side of this river have made a habit of trampling upon these things. If we are to truly uphold the values we swore to defend and protect, this war can only have one outcome.”

    He drew his sword from its sheath. It was a Model 1913 Cavalry Sword, a sabre that he had personally designed. His beloved weapon had never seen combat use. Swords may not have a place on the battlefield any more, something he thought to be a real shame. They were still far better than any gun when it came time to make dramatic gestures.

    “An outcome,” he said, raising his sword high into the air, “where the hammer and the sickle are no more welcomed in the world than is the goddamned swastika!”
    He drove the sword into the ice of the Yalu, right through what had until now been a small crack.

    Before the words were even fully out of his mouth, two Chinese rifles barked behind him. Patton never saw the pair of bullets that knocked him to the ground.

    - BNC
     
    Part III, Chapter 23
  • CHAPTER 23

    And I see not in my blindness
    What the objects were I wrought,
    But as God rules o'er our bickerings
    It was through His will I fought.

    November 29, 1950


    Sergeant Meeks, like almost everyone a few metres away from the Yalu, was crouched behind the trees and rocks as Patton delivered his speech. The general had insisted upon giving his speech on the river, despite it being the front line. He and some other noncoms had managed to convince most of the reporters and other civilians to take cover as best they could – this might have been a quiet sector yesterday, but it was still a battlefield. Then Patton started delivering his speech, and everyone forgot that the Chinese could be lurking nearby.
    That was, until two shots rang out.
    As Patton fell to the ground, Meeks feared that one of the shots had been fatal, until the general let out an incredible cry.

    “God damn it you sons of bitches, you missed!

    Still clutching his sword in one hand, he attempted to stand up and, like Theodore Roosevelt all those years ago, continue his speech. Unlike Roosevelt, he was clearly struggling, and certainly at least one of the Chinese shots hadn’t missed him. He didn’t manage much more than to sit halfway up when a couple of medics reached him. It was only at that point that Meeks realised, that speech was going to get him in trouble with the President. A lot of trouble.
    “Where’s the orderly?” one of the medics called out, and suddenly Meeks was no longer thinking about Truman any more.

    “I’m here!” Meeks said, running up to the ice. Noticing the medic’s two bars, he added a “sir.”
    “Here’s the deal.” the doc said. “He’s been hit once in each leg, and his fall gave him a hell of a shock. He’ll live, but only if we get him out of here immediately. I don’t think either shot hit anything vital. I’m most concerned about him bleeding out, and the plasma’s no good in this weather.” he finished tying a bandage around one of Patton’s wounds. The weather had convinced them to not even try removing his pants to do the job properly.
    Meeks thanked God that Patton had taken to flying by helicopter. There weren’t a whole lot of them in Korea (even despite Patton asking MacArthur to “get him as many as you can, and then more”), but one was parked less than a mile away.
    “Get him in the jeep.” Meeks said. “We’ve got a chopper up the road.” Then he turned to the pile of rocks and called out “John, get the jeep running!”

    It wasn’t until they were flying back to Hamhung that Patton spoke to Meeks for the first time.
    “God damn it! They missed.” he repeated his statement from the end of his speech, clearly in pain but determined not to show it.
    “Sir, they definitely hit you.” Meeks said.
    “In the wrong place.” Patton said. “That was my final battle. I went to the Yalu to die.”
    “You won’t die.” Meeks promised. “Not today. The doc said so.”
    “It is my destiny to die.” Patton protested. Meeks suddenly thought it was a good thing the medics had tied him to that stretcher on the helicopter’s side. Else the general might try to jump off.
    “Sir, have you ever considered there might be one last battle for you to fight yet?” Meeks proposed. He knew Patton talked about the gods of war and his destiny to die in battle. “Mars might be saving you for something. Now get some rest, sir.”
    Patton, for a wonder, actually listened.

    ***

    December 1, 1950

    President Harry Truman poured himself a bourbon. He didn’t drink often in the Oval Office and even less often at this time of the morning. Well, you didn’t get a surprise this shocking very often either, even as President of the United States.
    “Want some?” he offered the bottle to General Bradley.
    “No, thank you.” Bradley said. “What do you need today, Mr President?”
    There was no use beating around the bush today. “Patton has to go. Immediately. Have you seen his speech?”
    “I can’t say that I have.” Bradley said.
    “Here.” Truman passed him the morning paper, which had published the entire thing. “I told him not to go running his mouth, and now he’s gone and called for us to go to war with Moscow and kill anyone redder than a light shade of pink. That’s not just disobeying a direct order. That’s burning the damn thing. I’ve spent six months trying to avoid a big war with Red China and he was ten words away from starting one!”
    “I can have orders demanding his immediate resignation from Eighth Army command ready within the hour.” Bradley said. “And I won’t miss him one bit.”
    Truman shook his head. “No, he’s not retiring. If he does, everyone’s going to think he’s leaving for his health. Half the country just watched him get shot on the evening news and then rise up from the dead. If he walks away from this he’ll be a hero.” Truman’s face tightened. “I’m going to fire the son of a bitch. Publicly.”
    “You’re in for a fight.” Bradley warned. “It was Marshall that told him he couldn’t invade Japan, but for some reason he blamed Ike for it. A good part of his memoir is just him dragging Ike’s name through the mud, and I’m told his wife edited that down to the point that it was actually presentable.”
    “I don’t care if he comes after me with all the subtlety of a madman with a flamethrower, he has to go.” Truman said, although privately he did wonder if it would ruin his chances at a possible third term come 1952. “One of the key principles of this country was civilian control of the military, something Patton neglected to mention when he brought up the Revolution. If he invades Red China, any semblance of that is gone. My decision is final.”
    “General Ridgway has been ready to take over for Patton since the summer.” Bradley said.
    “Send him.” Truman ordered. “And order Patton out of Korea too. I think he’s in a hospital in Hamhung right now. Have him moved to Japan. His wife is already on a plane for Tokyo.”
    “Yes, sir!” Bradley said.
    As Truman finished his drink, he wished that he had never sent Patton to Korea in the first place. This day had been coming for a long time, and he knew it. A few days ago, Congress had been discussing whether or not to give Patton a fifth star, or alternatively the Medal of Honor, for his incredible feats of leadership as he turned the Eighth Army from clueless draftees to a force rivalling America’s best. If any such proposal reached his desk now, he vowed to throw it in the fireplace.

    ***

    December 5, 1950

    Lieutenant General Matthew Ridgway had stepped into Eighth Army’s Pyongyang headquarters for the first time yesterday, and had been immediately taken aback by just how rigorously the finest details of military regulations were followed here. Everyone wore their neckties, everyone’s shoes were polished, all those other little things that really didn’t matter a bit were being followed with an almost religious commitment. It made him wonder whether Patton would be more likely to place his hand on a Bible or a West Point regulations guide if he were ever required to swear an oath.
    Ridgway thought a lot of that stuff to be a waste of time, but he could also see that Patton’s staff did a first-rate job. If wearing their neckties helped them do that, that was all well and good. If not, he wasn’t going to enforce it with a $40 fine.
    He spent his first morning in Korea observing the staff much more than commanding them. Then in the afternoon, he had gone out to the front (Colonel Abrams had mentioned that a visit to the front every second day was mandatory for senior officers – a rule that Ridgway largely agreed with even if he thought it a bit excessive). If the staff had been loyal to Patton, the common soldiers were devoted to him. Half of the men he asked said that they thought he was some variant of “a hardass grumpy son of a bitch”, but to a man they agreed he was the best officer they had ever served under. Their hero had just been shot, and they wanted to avenge him.

    He had been marked as Eighth Army’s replacement commander if anything went wrong, and while in Washington he was briefed regularly of events going on out here. The problem was that most of those briefings came through MacArthur, and MacArthur had a habit of not giving the full story. Since coming to Korea he’d realised it was much more often MacArthur’s deputies that were actually handling things in Tokyo. The big general seemed to be much more interested in his work in Japan than he did the war in Korea.
    “I told Patton that he could have as much freedom as he needed to conduct operations within the Korean peninsula.” MacArthur had said yesterday. “Now I offer you that same freedom. I know I can count on you to bring about a successful end to the war.”

    MacArthur, he thought, was being optimistic (when was he not?). As he looked at the map he could see that Patton wasn’t just the man who almost won the Korean War, but also the man most likely to lose it. A headlong charge towards the Yalu, if the Chinese weren’t broken, was more likely to end in catastrophe than in victory. Even if this entire Chinese Army was obliterated, China had what amounted to a limitless supply of manpower. The Patton method wouldn’t work forever.
    “I warned him about the logistics of this operation, sir.” Walter Muller said, shaking his head. “He wouldn’t listen to me.”
    “What can we accomplish?” Ridgway said. “If we’re going to build a line somewhere, where would be the best spot?”
    “The Walker Line, or somewhere not far north of it, would be the best.” Muller said. “I could maintain that forever if we receive a few more trucks and spare parts. Further north, it depends on how many replacements I have. And the Chinese.”
    “Suppose for a moment that the Chinese retreat over the river and stay there. What would you require to hold the Yalu line?” Ridgway asked.
    “If you could double my stock of trucks and the fuel allocation, and gave me the parts to maintain them, I think it could be done.” Muller said. “Alternatively, if we had control of Odaejin, and the rail net east of Iwon was fully operational, then I would just require an additional fifty percent.”
    “I thought you were running a corps out of Iwon already.” Ridgway said.
    “We are, barely.” Muller said. “They’ve been at the Yalu for only a week, and three weeks ago they were still in Japan. If the Chinese sent a serious attack against them, I would not be confident of their ability to hold the line.”
    “There’s nothing on the other side of the river.” Ridgway noticed. “Two small tracks ten miles apart, and then nothing at all on the Chinese side for a good fifty miles either side. Could the Chinese even attack on that axis?”
    “If an American force attempted it, we would struggle.” Muller said. “Unfortunately, the Chinese seem better able to operate on a small logistical tail than we are. I wouldn’t count the possibility out.”

    He then had similar discussions with Oscar Koch, who seemed to have amassed more intelligence reports than MacArthur and Willoughby, or anyone in Washington, put together, as well as Creighton Abrams. All three suggested that Patton had made it this far north on pure force of will, and had seemed determined to push to the Yalu because that was the only way to end the war.
    At 1800 (apparently an hour later than Patton would have done it), he called a staff conference and laid out what the strategy would be.
    “The Yalu is no longer our final objective. West of the 128th meridian, I would like to order all of our forces to begin preparing to fall back to a fortified position following the Chongchon River as far as Yuwonjin, then the road through Yongnimdong to the Chosin Reservoir, and then to maintain the gap between the Reservoirs to Handaeri. In the east, X Corps is to maintain its position on the Yalu River, and ROK forces east of it are to continue as far as the Soviet border.” Ridgway said. “All of the mines, barbed wire, and other defensive materials in Pusan are to be moved north with the greatest practicable haste.” He was less surprised that Patton hadn’t used them than he was that Patton hadn’t just shipped those things back to Japan, or dumped them in the sea, as soon as they arrived.
    “Sir, if you don’t mind my asking, why are we pulling back?” Abrams asked. “Our offensive thus far has been successful.”
    “Think of the Yalu like you would the Roman Antonine Wall.” Ridgway said. “It costs a lot to take it and even more to hold it. Even if it might be possible to hold it indefinitely, we don’t need to, and don’t want to, to achieve our goals. West of the 128th, we are better served by falling back to our version of Hadrian’s Wall. The mountains on that line are just about impassable: even the Chinese didn’t attack through them in their first or second offensives. And east of them, the terrain on the Chinese side of the border is worse than it is on the Korean side, so we have an advantage and can hold the line there once the logistics are shored up a bit more. Holding a position on the Yalu will prevent the Chinese from demanding a rump North Korea, and such a state wouldn’t be viable with the scrap of land they have left. This war is as good as won, and unless the President orders me to finish the conquest up to the Yalu, I see no reason to lose men going there.”

    - BNC
     
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    Part III, Chapter 24
  • CHAPTER 24

    So forever in the future,
    Shall I battle as of yore,
    Dying to be born a fighter,
    But to die again, once more.

    December 8, 1950


    “General, your recovery is proceeding better than I initially predicted.” The ever-cheerful doctor said. “It may even be possible to discharge you before the end of the year!”
    Last week, the doctors in Korea hadn’t been nearly so optimistic. Then he got transferred to Tokyo, where this fellow happened to have an X-ray machine. Him and a couple of other doctors scanned Patton’s legs, and the only things they had found was a pair of holes busted in some flesh. Dr Cheerful seemed to think it was miracle, because nothing of importance had suffered any sort of real damage. Patton still wished that both those bullets had gone through his brain. He’d been shot in the leg as World War I drew to a close, and still resented the fact that he had missed out on the final battle of the war. Sherman said that war was hell. Patton knew that peacetime had always been worse. Why did the Chinese have to be such terrible shots?
    “I’ll let you rest. Keep your chin up, sir.” That annoyingly cheerful doctor said as he left the room. Patton didn’t hate the man’s excessively pleasant attitude in principle: he had visited thousands of aid stations and field hospitals throughout his forty years of service, and there had been many a wounded soldier that would have been glad to be treated by a doctor half as cheerful as that. The problem was that Patton didn’t want to be cheered up. No amount of being told to keep his chin up would ever make up for the sheet of paper he had received six days earlier.

    I deeply regret that it becomes my duty as President and Commander-in-Chief of the United States military forces to replace you as Commander of the Eighth United States Army.
    You will turn over your command, effective at once, to Lt. Gen. Matthew B. Ridgway. You are to travel to a suitable hospital in Japan and then to remain within that country until the conclusion of your medical treatment.
    My reasons for your replacement, will be made public concurrently with the delivery to you of the foregoing order, and are contained in the next following message.


    Truman, damn him, hadn’t deeply regretted a thing. The bastard had been all too eager to announce it to the entire world, and there hadn’t even been a Chinese sniper to knock him from the podium. Brad was there too, as well as a bunch of other top brass. The lot of them could all go to hell. Marshall fortunately wasn’t there: the sight of him with Truman would have made him stick one of his ivory-handled revolvers in his mouth and pull the trigger (not that he could do that right now – Beatrice had taken them off him). He still thought about doing it from time to time.
    Apart from a Bible and Caesar’s Commentaries on the Gallic War, the only other thing he kept on his bedside table was the Korean Service Medal, a new decoration that MacArthur had personally presented to him. Everyone who served in this war would eventually get one, but MacArthur had decided that he deserved to receive the first one, and announced it the day after Truman relieved him. Patton had written him a long letter of appreciation in response – it wasn’t like he had anything else to do in here. At least MacArthur still had a sense of decency. Too few others seemed to.

    December 14, 1950

    The day he stepped in as Press Secretary to briefly replace the late Charlie Ross back at the end of November, Stephen Early had described MacArthur as “the face of the Korean War”. President Harry Truman hadn’t had to look very hard to see why: every time the papers reported a victory, MacArthur was front and centre, while Patton was shoved off to the side. You had MacArthur holding the line at Taejon. You had MacArthur leading the “invasion” of Inchon (somehow the public had perceived that farce as a great triumph). You had MacArthur stepping out of the helicopter in Pyongyang. Somehow, His Majesty had managed to steal almost all of the glory from Patton, of all people. Truman had been just about sure that the American people had forgotten about Patton entirely – there hadn’t been much of a fanfare when he went to Korea back in July – when the general decided to make his fateful speech on the Yalu.
    Stephen Early didn’t have the job any more, but wherever he was, Truman was sure he was eating his words. Patton had stolen the spotlight back with just two Chinese bullets, and become an overnight national hero. The only problem was, Truman hadn’t been made aware of this until he had already announced that he was relieving Patton of command. It wouldn’t have changed his decision: he was steadfast in his conviction that Patton had to go, but it did mean that Gallup’s latest poll gave him an approval rating of just twenty-nine percent (he’d been averaging forty since the war began, and last month was sitting at thirty-six), and that Joe McCarthy had started another shouting match. Now he was just glad he hadn’t thrown Patton out of the army completely that day.

    Rather than spend any more time fretting about Patton, Truman decided to focus on starting the process that would eventually bring peace to Korea. A blind man could see that the UN had won, and if Patton’s inflammatory speech hadn’t destroyed Red China’s willingness to negotiate, then a favourable settlement could hopefully be reached soon. Unfortunately, when the day of his weekly meeting with Dean Acheson rolled around, he didn’t have much to show for it. Ambassador Panikkar had said that India’s good offices were ready to facilitate the negotiations, but that was about as far as anyone had gotten.

    “If it makes you feel any better, a group of thirteen UN states attempted to open negotiations with Red China a few days ago.” Dean Acheson said. “The Chinese radio has responded to this by saying that UN actions taken as long as Peking is denied a seat in New York are illegal.”
    “That’s a bit better than what Mr Panikkar told me.” Truman said. “He said that our boys were, to quote the Red Chinese, ‘American aggression forces’, and that as long as we were there, no agreement could be acceptable. Apparently Korean affairs should be left to the Korean people themselves.”
    “Aggression forces, is it?” Acheson laughed. “Now that Patton’s gone, Syngman Rhee has to be the biggest aggression force in that part of Asia. We might as well ignore that bluster though. As long as Ridgway can hold steady, and after the thumping Patton gave the CCF I reckon he can, then the Chinese aren’t going to push us too far from the current lines. Eventually the war will have to come to an end, and we won’t have to give up any of the territory we already control. Unless the Chinese conquer all the way to at least Hungnam, there’s not much point in keeping North Korea around as a puppet. Absent a drastic turn of events, such as the Russians jumping in, they’re going to have to accept a unified Republic of Korea eventually.”
    “They could annex the scraps they still hold.” Truman said.
    “They could, and if that was their price for an armistice I would personally have no hesitations accepting it. There’s nothing but mountains up there, and no big cities.” Acheson said. “However, the wording of the Chinese radio reply caught my attention. Red China wants the UN seat that Chiang now holds. If we offer them that in return for a free Korea, there’s a very good chance take it.”
    “That would mean dumping Chiang.” Truman pointed out. He remembered Prime Minister Attlee announcing that Britain would officially recognise Mao’s government back in January. London hadn’t had any official relations with Chiang since. If he let the United States repeat that, the China Lobby would skin him for it. “I’m not opposed to recognising Red China in principle, provided they promise to leave Formosa alone of course. Unless we are willing to start a new war, or escalate this one to topple them, someone is going to have to start up diplomatic relations eventually. The problem is, Congress would never agree to it. Joe McCarthy already wants my head. He’d get it if we suggested anything like this.”
    “I had come to a similar conclusion myself, and I don’t recommend we go that far.” Acheson said. “Unless we want to spend the next couple of years dithering in the North Korean mountains trying to wear the Chinese out, we’re going to need a proposal to put forward to the United Nations. I raised the UN seat point because, at least according to their media, the Red Chinese still think they’re winning.”
    “They’re not.” Truman said. Ridgway had sent him a report recently suggesting something of a stalemate had formed along the Changchon River in the far north of the peninsula.
    “Perhaps.” Acheson said. “My concern is, if you still want the war over as quickly as possible, we’re going to need some sort of concession to offer Mao in exchange for the rest of North Korea. He’s not just going to walk out.”
    “Would a fifty mile DMZ satisfy them?” Truman asked. It wasn’t much of a policy, but it was more than he’d had yesterday.
    “Only one way to know for sure.” Acheson said. “What I suggest is, we make a proposal along that line to both Congress and the UN. If both respond favourably, we ask Mr Panikkar to pass on our terms to Peking.”
    “Sounds like a plan.” Truman said. “Inform Mr Austin that I’d like to begin these talks as soon as possible.”

    ***

    December 23, 1950

    “So this is the end.” Douglas MacArthur said, welcoming Mrs Patton into his office. Her husband would be leaving hospital in a few days and was set to immediately return to California. Except for a farewell at the airbase, where George would announce his formal retirement, this would probably be his last meeting with the family. “You know, George and I first met in France in 1918, and even then he was one of the bravest men I’d ever seen. I knew he would accomplish a lot, but I don’t think either of us expected to end up here more than thirty years later. I’m very sorry about his wounds, and the Eighth Army will miss him greatly.” As he got his pipe going, he continued, “but I don’t imagine you asked to meet me just to hear about your husband’s accomplishments. What can I do for you?”
    “Georgie has spoken highly of you as of late, General.” Beatrice Patton said. “Earlier this week he suggested that you should run for President in the 1952 election. I was wondering if you had considered a campaign for the Republican nomination?”
    MacArthur puffed a couple of times on his pipe. “I was given such offers in 1944 and 1948.” he recalled. “I didn’t campaign the first time because we had yet to liberate the Philippines, and during the second I was still managing the Japanese affairs. I would still consider it, but any campaigning would have to occur only after the peace treaty is signed.” he thought that would be some time next year: Japan was most of the way to governing itself now. “Why do you ask?”
    “My family has been prominent in the Republican Party since the time of Grant’s administration, especially in Massachusetts. Georgie and I have been living in California, and I know a number of the party leaders there as well. If you choose to run, you have our full support.” Beatrice said. “I’m offering it now, as opposed to late next year, because your best chance at securing the nomination is if your campaign is associated with this war. President Truman’s credibility has been ruined recently, and Georgie won’t run for any office, so you’re the only candidate that can benefit directly from this victory. We should take advantage of the present momentum, using it to preempt the other candidates.”
    “Who do you have in mind?” MacArthur asked when he heard that last point.
    “Taft. Dewey. Eisenhower.” Beatrice said. “Particularly Eisenhower. He has the war hero platform too, and is very popular with the public. They tried to make him run in the last election, and I expect there will be a similar movement this time. If he does throw his hat in the ring, he’ll without a doubt be the strongest competition.”
    MacArthur had a copy of George’s book on his desk. “George has already tried going after Eisenhower.” he observed.
    “Dragging Eisenhower’s name through the mud hasn’t worked to reduce his popularity, no.” Beatrice agreed. “Although I suspect that Georgie’s focus will be on Truman and Bradley now. His endorsement could be quite valuable to the campaign however, especially if he gives it before Ike enters the race.”
    MacArthur leaned back in his chair and puffed on his pipe again. It seemed that one old soldier at least, even in spite of his wounds and two retirements, wasn’t going to fade away.

    END OF PART III

    - BNC
     
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    Part IV, Chapter 25
  • PART IV: TRIUMPH

    CHAPTER 25


    September 9, 1951

    The signing of the Treaty of San Francisco, a document that finally ended the occupation of Japan, and with it the last vestiges of World War II, should have been an occasion worth a celebration. For the people of Japan, and forty-nine other nations including the United States and the recently reunified Republic of Korea, it was.
    For President Harry Truman it was not.
    A newspaper – today’s edition of the New York Herald Tribune – sat on his desk. Truman was used to being annoyed by the Tribune – the paper, like most of the media and indeed more than two thirds of the country, did not like him very much and often produced stories that served no purpose other than heap additional piles of dung onto his legacy. But today’s headline would have annoyed him even if it came from the Washington Post.

    ‘MacARTHUR: I HAVE RETURNED’

    Quite likely part of that was just some editor making a joke about His Majesty’s most famous phrase, but for all the trouble He had caused when he was in Tokyo, right now Truman wished He had stayed there. Instead, the five-star general had decided to run for President in next year’s election.
    “He’s a damned liar.” Truman had grumbled as he read the story earlier that morning. When president and general had met – for the only time – at Midway island, Truman had asked MacArthur if he had any aspirations for the highest office in the country. “None.” MacArthur had replied. “If a general will run against you, his name will be Eisenhower, not MacArthur.” Eisenhower hadn’t given any indication that he was the slightest bit interested in the office, even after Truman had offered him unconditional support should he run as a Democrat in 1948. MacArthur, or more likely his supporters, had organised a parade attended by around a million people in Los Angeles, and then announced his intentions in the most public way possible.
    The worst part was, Truman couldn’t do a whole lot to stop him. A few weeks ago, MacArthur had made a formal request for indefinite leave effective September 1st. His five stars kept him in the Army for life, but this was as close to retirement as he would get. What he was going to do in retirement had been obvious for months: Patton, in one of his many angry speeches since he returned from Asia, had been praising MacArthur’s leadership and occasionally suggested that he become the nation’s thirty-fourth president (and proudly wearing his Medal of Honor – given to him by Congress over Truman’s personal objections – while doing so). Truman wished Patton would run himself: now that the furor over his firing had died down, his public rants were attracting smaller crowds by the week. Patton had no political skill to speak of either. Truman knew he was dead in the water if he ran next year against a serious candidate (which MacArthur, much to his frustration, would be). Against Patton, his chances wouldn’t be too bad.
    Truman had thought about refusing that leave, and ordering MacArthur into some worthless position that would keep him from causing any more trouble than he already had (Wyoming had plenty of coastal defences that needed supervising). The only problem with that was, MacArthur would just ignore the order, the way he so often did, come home, and campaign regardless. If the president raised an objection to that, the public would just back MacArthur. They had when he relieved Patton, and they would again. At that point, it would be much easier to just hand MacArthur the keys to the White House.

    A secretary appeared at the door. “Mr President, Mr Kennan is waiting to see you.”
    “Thank you. Send him in.” Truman said.

    George F. Kennan wasn’t working for Truman’s government any more, but there was no-one else in the country who understood the Soviet Union as well as he did. They hadn’t intervened in Korea once the 38th parallel was crossed the way many had feared, and indeed shortly after the new year they apparently pulled out of Korea altogether, leaving the fight to the Red Chinese. Yet their refusal to sign the Treaty of San Francisco – announced in a statement by Andrei Gromyko yesterday – told Truman that this was no withdrawal from the ‘Cold War’ as a whole. So here he was, asking Kennan for advice once again.
    “What do you think Stalin’s going to do?” Truman asked after greetings were exchanged. It was blunt, but he had always been one to get straight to the point.
    “I cannot say what exactly – Russia’s pretty good at keeping secrets from us. What I do think is that they will do something. Stalin’s not happy about this.” Kennan said.
    “He pulled out of Korea. Abandoned the place.” Truman observed. “And it is hard to believe that Mao agreed to that cease fire without Stalin’s approval.”
    “Indeed, although I would find it hard to believe that Stalin wanted a war with George Patton of all people.” Kennan said. “That aside, he is not happy about Korea, and I’m not saying that just because red team lost. Stalin’s an old man, and some of my colleagues and I have been trying to get a sense of who his successor might turn out to be. One such candidate was Nikita Khrushchev, a Red Army commissar, present at Stalingrad, did some work in the Ukraine afterwards. He’s dropped off the map.”
    “What happened to him?” Truman asked.
    “There was no announcement of a death and a public mourning period, so I’d say we can rule out a natural death. He’d still be in his fifties, so retirement is unlikely. Past that, all I can guess is ‘nothing good’.” Kennan said. “It doesn’t make a lot of sense for Stalin to blame Khrushchev for Korea, but it is one explanation.”
    “In which case, Stalin would be looking for a way to get us back?” Truman asked.
    “It’s likely.” Kennan said. “And if I had to guess where, I’d look at either Europe or the Middle East.”

    ***

    In his 1882 ‘Chinese Memorandum’, future Lieutenant General Arthur MacArthur Jr had foreseen America playing a decisive role in acquiring the riches of Asia by dominating the trade routes of the Pacific. For this to be achieved, a major port would have to be established on the West Coast, which could then develop into “one of the leading handlers of commerce in the country”. Around the turn of the century, that envisioned trade hub became the artificial harbour of Los Angeles.
    His son, General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, had dedicated his life to following through on this grand vision that his father had once written. During the presidency of Chester Arthur, America’s influence in the Pacific had been little more than an optimistic dream. Now, he was the man who had restored American influence to the Philippines, and brought it to Japan and to Korea. Those nations, alongside Chiang’s Chinese holdout in Formosa as well as Australia and New Zealand, were now some of America’s staunchest allies. The United States dominated the Pacific just as his father had envisioned.
    With his life’s work, at least as he saw it then, completed, MacArthur thought it fitting to return to the United States by arriving in the same city where it all began: Los Angeles, California. He had spent more than a third of his life out of the country. It would be his thirteen year old son’s first day here.

    The path leading up to announcing himself as a candidate for the Republican nomination and been long and far more complicated than any outside observer was likely to acknowledge. When George and Beatrice Patton had suggested it to him, he had accepted their offered support (which in George’s case, meant frequent speeches that seemed to serve no purpose other than to attack people who had done him wrong in the past). Despite what George would later claim, he was not the first to suggest it. MacArthur had already been a presidential candidate twice, though he made no effort to campaign. A 1952 run was almost expected of him.
    For months, years really, he had thought those people who expected him to run would be disappointed, until he saw the State Department completely mishandle the victory he had presented them with in Korea. State had cut him out of any negotiations with the Red Chinese, appointing John Foster Dulles for the job, and then found that Mao had exactly no intention of negotiating at all. Diplomatic overtures went ignored while the communist New Years’ Offensive killed thousands and took no ground. Another attempt around Easter proved even less successful, as by that point Ridgway had had enough time to build his defensive works on the Chongchon. Only after that, when Mao decided he had extracted enough prestige from the stalemate, did the communists agree to the terms that Dulles had offered in December.
    Not all the blame for the extended war had to be pinned on State. Some of it belonged with Harry Truman himself. If Truman hadn’t insisted on firing Patton, the Red Chinese wouldn’t have spent months holding that pocket in northwestern Korea. They would have been forced back across the Yalu, a straightforward demand to follow: peace or utter destruction. Then, once they agreed to peace, MacArthur would have had all of 1951 to ensure the end of the Japanese occupation went as smoothly as possible. That had always been his first priority.
    By the time Dulles informed him that a treaty would be signed in September, the only thing left to do was cut orders to send the occupation troops to other duties. His mission of building a free and democratic Japan accomplished, he turned over command of the Dai Ichi to Ridgway, and decided to embark on that most unusual transition, from soldier to candidate.

    “Why did I finally decide to run?” he would explain to an interviewer later in his life. “If I didn’t, my father’s mission to project and preserve American influence over the Pacific would have been a failure. All the top candidates but myself did not properly appreciate what had been built there. Eisenhower was a fine man, but he spent too much time thinking about Europe. Taft wanted us to pull out of our international commitments everywhere. Dewey had lost to Truman once already, and the last thing we needed was Harry Truman of all people receiving a third term. There was no alternative to a MacArthur candidacy. The country was calling upon me, and I had to answer them.”

    ***

    MacArthur chose Los Angeles as the point of his return for a number of reasons. Foremost among them, he didn’t want to be in the same city as the signing of the peace treaty. He wanted a distinct story in the papers, and the best way to get that was to stage a distinct event. Less obvious to outside observers was another reason: it was close to the Patton family home, and a personal meeting, the first since December 1950, could be valuable to the campaign.
    So it was. While George acknowledged that his influence was fading quickly (“a damn shame” as he described it), and that he didn’t know the first thing about politics, Beatrice had been active in seeking support for MacArthur’s candidacy. She had a list, naming just about every prominent conservative in California except Richard Nixon, that she thought would support him. Then she produced a letter from George’s nephew Frederick Ayer Jr, who offered to be MacArthur’s campaign manager. Ayer had spent two months supporting Wendell Wilkie’s campaign in 1940 and had run as the Republican candidate for Massachusetts’ Attorney General in 1950, losing in a close election. He was well connected, and would be a valuable asset to the campaign; MacArthur accepted the offer on the spot. “Tell him I’d like to meet him when I arrive in Boston.”
    That would not be for another six weeks: first he intended to cross the country making appearances in as many major cities as he could as the campaign built up momentum. He could count on a range of longtime supporters including Former House Majority Leader Joseph Martin and Senate Minority Leader Kenneth Wherry (who had recently recovered from a major surgery), as well as the conservative faction of Congress that followed them. Henry Luce and the Hearst press would back him, and Colonel Pat Echols, his press man in Tokyo, had left the Army to continue with him on the campaign (MacArthur promised him the position of Press Secretary if they won). There was no question of his popularity, but that popularity still had to be mobilised into a campaign worthy of America’s next President.

    - BNC
     
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    Part IV, Chapter 26
  • CHAPTER 26

    MacArthur’s strongest bastion of support had always come from the Midwest, and Wisconsin in particular. The general’s attachment to what would become his home state was more due to his father than his own experience – he had been born in Arkansas, and the Army had been his ‘home’ since the turn of the century. Wisconsin had called him its own in 1948, and when a Milwaukee donor offered him a home in the city, the Badger State became the headquarters of the MacArthur campaign once more.
    After spending two and a half weeks touring the western half of the country, receiving huge crowds at every stop he made, MacArthur arrived in Milwaukee on September 27th, where he was greeted by Phil LaFollette and Robert Wood, two men who had served under him (Wood in World War I, LaFollette in World War II) and who were both well-known Republicans that had spearheaded his campaign in 1948. LaFollette, who had attempted to form a Progressive Party in the 1930s, often disagreed with the firm conservative Wood on policy matters. The one exception to this was foreign policy: like most in the Midwest and indeed much of the Republican Party, both men favoured a more isolationist tone be taken.
    MacArthur’s first meeting with his Wisconsin team, predictably, centred around foreign policy. It was one field where MacArthur could legitimately claim to have experience, having been the de facto governor of both the Philippines and then Japan, and his desire to change America’s position on the world stage provided most of his motivation to run for office in the first place. While Truman had concentrated on Europe, MacArthur proposed to give priority to Asia. He had attacked Truman’s handling of Asian affairs several times as he paraded through the western states, reminding the public that Truman had ‘lost’ China, and how he had taken months to secure a peace in Korea after the Yalu River was reached. Then he offered his allies his first policy point: if elected, he would meet with Chiang. The Chinese leader was popular in America, and a formal defensive alliance would secure America’s position and contain communism across the entire Pacific Rim.

    Satisfied that he had made his views clear, MacArthur retired for his afternoon nap, leaving the matter for his subordinates to turn into a platform however they saw fit. Subordinates they were too: just as he had in wartime, MacArthur would announce his orders to his staff, and unless he took a particular interest in the matter, they would be free to carry them out however they saw fit. They would then report back not to MacArthur himself, but to his chief of staff, and then said chief of staff would decide what information was important enough to pass back to the top, often with MacArthur being unaware or uninterested in the minor details. In the Pacific, he had Sutherland. In Tokyo, he had Almond (at least until Patton decided Almond wasn’t worth listening to). On the campaign trail, he would soon have Frederick Ayer. LaFollette and Wood reported to him.

    ***

    October 11, 1951

    “I’m sorry, Mr President, but I don’t see any way out of this.”
    Harry Truman had expected the words long before they came out of his Secretary of the Treasury’s mouth, indeed they were a big part of why he had made it a priority to meet with him today, but hearing John Snyder say them was about as welcome as being kicked by a mule all the same.
    “This recession is expected to be short and mild, but unless you have another Korean War to get people in work, we’re going to face a downturn.” Snyder continued. “If the Feds didn’t insist on tightening monetary policy right now, we might have been able to ride this out, but cutting spending and hiking rates at the same time makes our job nearly impossible.”
    “The price we pay for an independent Fed.” Truman said glumly. Just seven months ago, he had called all the top people at the Federal Reserve to the White House to sort out their differences, chief among them their unwillingness to keep supporting the government’s spending, and the result had been separating the Treasury from the Fed. Almost immediately, the Fed had decided that inflation was getting out of control, something that had concerned Truman for a while, and so they raised interest rates. Snyder had explained it as being like ‘lightly pressing the brake on the economy’, which until now had been roaring.
    Then the Korean War ended. Fifty billion dollars of government money had been going to the military, and the 1951 deficit was much larger than Truman had been comfortable with. As soon as there was no war, he moved quickly to slash the military’s budget in half. It wasn’t quite the full-fledged ‘economisation’ of 1946-49, which some critics had lambasted him for, saying it had left the US weak and exposed, and even going so far as to blame for the Korean War itself (though had it really been that bad of a policy? Korea had been a striking success even with a greatly reduced spend on the Army), but it did give him a chance of delivering a balanced budget next year.

    “What can I do then to reduce the impact of this recession?” Truman asked.
    “A few things. Tax cuts will give people more money to spend. An infrastructure build will create jobs. If the Fed cuts rates back to their previous level, that would help too.” Snyder said.
    “We can’t do anything about the Fed, it has been less than a year since we signed that Accord.” Truman said. “And both of the others will result in a larger deficit.”
    “That’s correct.” Snyder said. “Unless you let the recession run its course, it is likely we will face a deficit in this year’s budget.”
    “Damned if we do, damned if we don’t.” Truman said. Being president meant you got blamed whenever something went wrong: the Republicans were already starting to blame him for the recession, and they’d blamed him for all the recent deficits as well. The only problem was, this president didn’t seem to get any of the credit when things went well: nobody thanked him for winning the Korean War. They thanked MacArthur.
    “Leave the taxes as they are.” Truman decided. “Alert me – immediately – if things show any sign of getting worse, but we can ride it out for now.”

    ***

    While Harry Truman continued to wrestle with his Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve, MacArthur’s great tour across the country continued to attract huge numbers of spectators, including the largest ticker-tape parade in history in New York. The last stop was Boston, where after giving a speech to an audience of thousands, he would finally meet in person the man who would aim to put him in the White House.
    Frederick Ayer Jr’s first meeting with Douglas MacArthur very quickly convinced him that MacArthur would be his own greatest obstacle. MacArthur had a lot of support – he had the Hearst papers, he had Henry Luce, he had the LaFollettes. Harry Truman’s popularity was at a record low, so 1952 would be a likely victory for whoever ended up with the Republican nomination. MacArthur was arguably the most popular person in the country, and had recently come home from two victorious wars – although Winston Churchill, recently re-elected as Prime Minister, had proved in 1945 that that did not mean as much as people thought it did. Regardless, MacArthur should have had the presidency in the bag.
    Instead, MacArthur greeted Ayer the same way he greeted almost everyone he met, with a monologue. “A very fine monologue to be sure, and one that incorporated all the best parts of the English language, but he did not seem to realise that presidents are not elected purely on oratory.” Ayer would later say. “I was impressed with what he did say, and I believed he would be a better president than Robert Taft or the Democrats, but there was a lot he did not say, and it became my job to make sure he said the right things and didn’t leave anything important out.”

    Ayer had written to his uncle several times asking what to expect from MacArthur, and Patton’s replies had amounted to ‘he thinks he knows everything’. MacArthur never asked questions – that would imply there was something he did not know. He spoke, you listened, and then his policies, combined with the fact that he was Douglas MacArthur, would get him into the White House. Within half an hour of meeting the general, Ayer could see that Patton, if anything, had understated it.
    MacArthur’s policies, indeed the only things he had spoken at length on across his national tour, were that taxes needed to be cut and that he had turned Japan into a “shining light of democracy” and could apply his experience to the United States. The former could come from any Republican candidate, and likely most Democrats too, so Ayer didn’t worry about it too much. The latter put MacArthur as arguably the most qualified person to ever run the country other than a former president, by virtue of having actually run a country before, but it wasn’t the sort of thing that was going to convince a farmer in Kansas or a coal miner in West Virginia to vote for him.
    After it became apparent that an afternoon meeting in Boston would not be enough to get MacArthur’s campaign moving beyond tax cuts and Japan, and thanks to another letter from Patton telling him that MacArthur never used the telephone, Ayer decided the best way to move forward would be to fly to Milwaukee, sit down and talk with the general and some of his key supporters, and find out what parts of his policies could actually be put on a campaign poster without turning the electorate against him (as even at this early stage, some of his ideas turned to the downright bizarre). All the while convincing the general that everything was his own idea.

    In Milwaukee, Ayer questioned MacArthur on every aspect of government policy that he could think of (“General, how should the government handle labour unions?” or “General, what do you think about the Tennessee Valley Authority?”), and realised that for a lot of aspects of policy, what MacArthur said, what he thought he believed, and what he actually believed were three different things. “Take the New Deal” Ayer would say in a 1977 interview, “MacArthur said that FDR’s policies amounted to an impossible fantasy, then when I questioned him on New Deal policies, such as Social Security or Crop Insurance for farmers, he said he thought just about all of them were a good idea. Then, five minutes later, he would brag to me about how successful policies very similar to them had been in Japan.”
    Ayer would say that his greatest challenge in the whole campaign was to convince MacArthur to admit to things that he already believed in, but at the same time making it seem like it was the general’s idea. He knew that if MacArthur openly attacked the popular New Deal, it would spell doom for the campaign, and even though MacArthur agreed with most of it, he was likely to do just that. On the New Deal issue specifically, Ayer decided to preempt MacArthur’s bad habits, and had Pat Echols quote the general speaking favourably on New Deal policies in the papers. If the press established him as a New Deal supporter, maybe they wouldn’t question him so heavily on it later down the line.
    Ayer soon boiled MacArthur’s policies down to a few key points. On the domestic front, MacArthur was an economic conservative: he wanted to balance the budget, bring taxes down and generally believed in a lassiez-faire approach to the economy. He was much more liberal when it came to social policy: he supported civil rights (though that touchy subject would have to be kept quiet if they intended to contest the South), and tended to favour a strong labour movement, which would help him capture the votes of the Northeast. His preference was for Congress, not the President, to drive legislation, up to and including declarations of war (the latter point being a blatant criticism of Harry Truman’s actions in June 1950), and he supported the rights of states to handle their own affairs. Abroad, a Cold War version of Theodore Roosevelt’s ‘speak softly and carry a big stick’ rounded everything out nicely.
    Presented well, there was something in the platform to appeal to both liberals and conservatives, hawks and doves, and everyone in between (almost… Ayer and the rest of the campaign would have to decide if it was worth making an effort in the reliably Democratic South and its hundred or so electoral votes). But beyond the millions-strong crowds, Ayer knew that MacArthur was also a controversial figure with a long lifetime of enemies. The best platform in the world wouldn’t mean anything if they weren’t handled correctly.

    The following day, November 6th, MacArthur’s first real challenger for the Presidency threw his hat in the ring.

    - BNC
     
    Part IV, Chapter 27
  • CHAPTER 27

    The beginning of MacArthur’s 1952 campaign for president has often been labelled as a better-managed restart of his 1948 campaign. In 1948, despite MacArthur not being in the country, he had allowed – some would say encouraged – his supporters to campaign for him in Wisconsin, and the result was a narrow defeat in the primary held in that state. Failure had spelt the end for his campaign then, and if he lost his home state a second time without a strong showing elsewhere, it doubtless would again. Frederick Ayer Jr and Phil LaFollette thought that a five point difference could easily be made up by the stunning victory in Korea and having MacArthur physically on the campaign trail, but there was no doubt that their opponents would be throwing everything they had into the fight too.
    As in 1948, MacArthur’s main rival in the Badger State would be Harold Stassen of nearby Minnesota. Stassen had run for president twice before, and was no stranger to the campaign trail. He was young and energetic, and had been a popular Governor. On paper, he had the makings of a strong candidate – far stronger than Harry Truman might have been (“We won’t be up against Truman, but whoever the Democrats pick will have to carry his baggage” in the words of LaFollette). But if MacArthur could beat him, the path to the White House would get that much easier.
    Like MacArthur, Stassen also had a collection of supporters waiting for him to announce his candidacy, and no small number of them were backing him just to oppose those who had lined up behind MacArthur. Whoever LaFollette supported, Thomas Coleman (who had his own formidable political machine) would oppose. Coleman had supported Stassen in 1948, and despite being closer to the more conservative MacArthur in ideology, he would back Stassen again. Ayer and LaFollette weren’t concerned: they’d come close to beating Coleman before, and this time they had a far better campaign (it didn’t hurt that MacArthur’s name alone was enough to pull in millions of dollars of donations from across the country).

    What LaFollette hadn’t counted on was that Stassen too had an ace up his sleeve: ‘Tail-Gunner Joe’.

    Senator Joseph McCarthy had been Stassen’s campaign manager in 1948, and by all accounts he had done a good job: Stassen had taken four of the twelve state primaries. He had also issued a public letter to voters attacking MacArthur’s own suitability for the presidency, saying that at sixty-seven he was too old for the job and ready for “a well-deserved hero’s retirement”. MacArthur was now 71, not 67, making McCarthy’s age arguments all the more credible, and Ayer would eventually convince MacArthur to announce that he would choose a younger man to be vice-president to allay the public’s fears. Who that would be would not be decided for some time to come: there were more pressing matters to attend to. Actually winning the nomination, for one.
    What concerned the MacArthur campaign the most was that McCarthy was a far more dangerous opponent now than he had been four years prior. In 1948, he had been a little known senator. By the dawn of 1952, he had made himself a name as America’s fiercest critic of communists, famous for his accusatory behaviour (many times with flimsy evidence at best), and he was considered one of the most powerful men in the Senate. In the 1950 midterms, he had backed a range of Republican candidates, most of whom won their seats, while men who he had opposed tended to lose their elections.
    MacArthur also sensed that McCarthy put his campaign in a difficult spot. Several of his most important supporters, Senator Kenneth Wherry at the top of the list, were also avid McCarthyists, and doing anything that could be construed as denouncing McCarthy risked losing their support. Yet if nothing was done, McCarthy would effectively have free reign to trample all over MacArthur’s campaign, with either fact or more likely falsehood.
    “Fortunately, Joe has a lot of enemies. Maybe he’ll make a mistake.” Pat Echols said one day.

    Enter General Patton.

    By the December of 1951, Patton had spent nearly a year in retirement since he left Korea, and had enjoyed very little of it. Convinced that Truman had led the top brass of the Army to ‘betray’ him before he could die the glorious death of a warrior, he had fallen into a deep depression, leading to his behaviour becoming increasingly unpredictable. His strict physical regimen, which had kept him in impeccable shape in spite of many injuries over the years, was let go in favour of a newfound drinking habit, and the few people he was still close with noticed he smoked and cursed far more than he had in the past.
    Holding a vendetta against just about every high-ranking officer in the Army and the Truman administration, he had also taken to publicly criticising them both in the papers (where his language remained respectable enough) and in speeches across southern California. CBS attempted to put him on TV once in March 1951, only for the program to be scrapped before ever being put to air due to Patton’s language. Then in May, Patton decided to level his criticism at Eisenhower, one of few generals more popular than himself, and when Eisenhower delivered a calm but brilliant rebuke of Patton’s statements (which amounted to calling “Ike” a coward for not invading the Soviet Union), most of Patton’s followers abandoned him. His speeches would attract smaller and smaller crowds, attending more for entertainment than anything else.
    Then Joseph McCarthy made the worst decision of his career. He attempted to smear George C. Marshall.

    McCarthy and Marshall had despised each other for a while, but it was not until the dying days of the Korean War that McCarthy launched his first attack on Marshall. Unlike most of the senator’s bluster-ridden statements, this one had competed with the end of the war for headlines, and few outside the Senate paid it any attention. McCarthy then seems to have become distracted with other targets, as his next attack on Marshall would not come until October. When it did come, it was furious: Marshall had “conspired” with the Soviets at Yalta to give the Red Army control of half of Europe; Marshall had “sabotaged” an aid bill to China, allowing Chiang to fall; Marshall had “invited” the communists into Korea, and then he had failed to drive them out quickly enough, costing hundreds more American lives. All in all, Marshall was to blame for every diplomatic or military failure of the last eight years.
    Patton, who counted Marshall as one of his two remaining friends in anything resembling a high place (MacArthur being the other), was outraged. Within twenty-four hours of McCarthy’s attack, Patton managed to convince the ABC to air him on the radio, where he delivered a sweeping criticism of McCarthy, calling him “dishonourable”, “pathetic”, and a “stain upon the Senate”. The media immediately caught on to what was sure to be a popular story: few people had dared challenge McCarthy so directly before, and even fewer had come out of it looking good. McCarthy would accuse them of being part of a communist plot or conspiracy, or even declare them to be out-and-out Red, and their reputation would be in ashes before the week was out.
    Patton wasn’t fazed. He had given up caring about his reputation somewhere south of the Yalu River, and his anti-communist credentials were second to none. He had the scars and the limp to prove it. With no prospect of another war on the horizon, Patton was also looking for a fight. So all throughout November, Patton attacked McCarthy in the press, and the senator, predictably, retaliated, until on January 10th, 1952, the New York Times published the most famous headline since Dewey “defeated” Truman.

    ‘McCARTHY LABELS PATTON A COMMUNIST AGENT!’

    He had taken the bait.

    Patton had expected that reaction for weeks, and now that he had it, he was quick to seize the opportunity to humiliate his rival. McCarthy had made a habit of investigating supposed communists, not in a court, but on the floor of the Senate, where he was surrounded by all of his cronies and few of his opponents. There was no impartial jury to worry about, so McCarthy could use as many of his lies as he saw fit without fear of being called out, making it the perfect kangaroo court. Despite this, Patton publicly dared him to ‘investigate’ his communist links, and McCarthy was more than happy to oblige.
    As he had when McCarthy attacked Marshall, Patton went to the ABC, suggesting that the ‘trial’ be filmed and broadcast on TV, live for much of the East Coast. They expressed concern about the language he was likely to use, to which Patton replied “the hell with it. Unless Stalin starts a war or something, this is going to be the biggest show until the election. Just put a warning up at the start to settle the old ladies. I’m going to ruin the son of a bitch, and the best way to do so is to let the whole country see him for the crook he is.” The ABC agreed, but decided against a live airing, instead choosing to edit out Patton’s profanities and showing it the following day.

    ***

    January 29, 1952

    As he sat in front of the ABC microphone and stared at that son of a bitch senator on the other side of the room, George Patton’s mind went back to that day he had spent at the Yalu River. Despite his best efforts to persuade them, the gods of war had not taken him. His place in Valhalla was waiting – he was certain of it – but the valkyries had not come. In all those miserable days since, he had come up with exactly one reason why they had not: there was at least one battle left to fight. Perhaps this was it. Such a shame they wouldn’t let him bring his six-shooters here…
    ‘Tail-Gunner Joe’, as it turned out, was a coward of the highest order. Someone, Patton didn’t care who, had dug up an old story where McCarthy claimed to have suffered a war wound in a plane crash during World War II. Turned out the yellow bastard had busted his leg doing something stupid when his ship crossed the Equator for the first time.

    “How the hell do you think I got this?” Patton had asked, lifting the leg of his pants to show where a pair of bullets had briefly been in 1950 (as well as an old wound from the Great War). “All you do, all you have ever done, is lie about where the damn communists are. You don’t know the slightest goddamned bit about where the hell they are. They’re not in the State Department. George Marshall’s a hero, not a Red. They’re not in Hollywood. They’re on the goddamned Yalu River and in Moscow. And if you had any guts at all, you’d have joined the Marines and fought under me in Korea. You call yourself a military hero. You’re not. The real heroes are those brave sons of bitches we couldn’t bring back home!”
    “I served my country!” McCarthy blasted back.
    “You don’t know the first thing about service! I was serving this country – actually serving, not your shit of an excuse for it, while you were still pissing your short pants.” Patton shouted back. “Serving means actually going out and shooting the Nazi and communist sons of bitches and putting your own damned dick on the line. All you did was sit aboard a ship getting drunk on watch and then pissed off as quick as you possibly could. That’s not service, that’s goddamned yellow cowardice!”
    Patton heard a gavel banging in the background. Someone of importance, doubtless one of McCarthy’s goons, wanted him to shut up. He ignored it.
    “This investigation is a farce. Your committee couldn’t find evidence of prostitution if you sent a hundred men into a whorehouse. If it were anything else, I wouldn’t be here. I got shot telling Harry Truman to go to war with the Red sons of bitches. Isn’t it obvious that I’m about as likely to be a Red as Stalin is to sing Yankee Doodle? There’s one less communist country in the world today than there was a year and a half ago, and they're gone because of the army that I led to battle them. Where the hell were you last year? I sure didn’t see you in Korea.”
    Then Patton pulled out some photos he had been given all the way back in 1945. “Senator, I think it is about time you showed some damned respect to the brave men who give their lives to their country, instead of spitting on their faces.”

    The photos, as he would later explain for the cameras, were from the Malmedy massacre during the Battle of the Bulge. Those weren’t his men – they had belonged to the First Army – but he had seen some of the sites himself. McCarthy was on record calling for the commutation of the death sentences for the SS bastards behind it.

    Two weeks later, Patton would be told that it was the ABC’s most-watched program of all time, a record that would take years to be broken. He didn’t care about that. What he did care about was victory, and he had scored a big one. McCarthy’s reputation was in tatters.

    - BNC
     
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    Part IV, Chapter 28
  • CHAPTER 28

    February 4, 1952

    “Under the present administration, this nation has been allowed to lose its way. Our rugged individualism has been exchanged for centralisation, an increase in government power and overreach. Arbitrary restrictions on business and enterprise have not brought the promised prosperity. It has only encouraged waste and inefficiency in the public administration, while our leaders continue to pursue reckless economic policies that drive people out of work. Ever since the present government took office, unemployment numbers have maintained a persistent and devastating upward climb. The value of the dollar is half of what it was at the end of the last war, and the blame for this lies solely with the mismanagement encouraged by our current leaders.
    I am reminded of my recent visit to Maine, where I met an old friend, a brave veteran, once a major under my command during the Pacific War, and his young family. He had won the Silver Star for bravery under fire, and when he returned home had started his own business. That small business, a symbol of the very spirit that led to our nation’s creation, has now failed, and when I met him for the first time since the war, he asked me a question I will never forget. He said ‘General, we may have won the war, but where is our victory?’
    I had no answer, so instead I offered him a promise: if a MacArthur administration is elected, I would bring that victory home…”


    Frederick Ayer Jr was reading over the speech that MacArthur was going to deliver in Cleveland later this week. Despite the campaign having hired a speechwriter, the general tended to insist upon writing the first draft of his speeches himself. Ayer supposed they were fortunate that he allowed anyone to edit his speeches at all. Initially, he hadn’t, and his stubbornness had set the campaign back. One speech in particular had been delivered without anyone other than Pat Echols or the general seeing it beforehand. He had denounced FDR and Truman for leading the country towards a “totalitarian state”, in particular because of Roosevelt’s attempt to ‘pack’ the Supreme Court by appointing more justices. It was fairly safe to attack Truman, who was struggling to maintain even a twenty percent approval rating, but FDR? On an issue that hadn’t been relevant for over a decade? A poll in Life magazine shortly afterwards had seen MacArthur’s name listed by several percentage points fewer than a month ago.
    It was a good thing that had been in November: the electorate would forget about it in time, and MacArthur was now (somewhat) more willing to listen to his team.

    One sentence had caught his eye while reading this speech. ‘Bring victory home’. It sounded optimistic. It sounded memorable. And it was the sort of thing that described MacArthur perfectly: the Democrats, and indeed every likely Republican challenger, had been in the United States over the last several years. Truman’s Recession, as it was unflatteringly named, had happened on their watch. MacArthur had been abroad, going from success to success in the Philippines, Japan and Korea. It would be the perfect campaign slogan. MacArthur could even take credit for thinking of it.
    He reached for the phone. Phil LaFollette would want to know about this.

    ***

    The slogan could not have come a moment too soon. Harold Stassen’s campaign was suffering from its association with McCarthy, but he was no longer MacArthur’s only competition. On January 17th, Robert Taft announced that he would be a candidate, and the entire MacArthur team knew he would be a much stronger challenger than Stassen had ever been.
    The senator from Ohio had made two previous attempts at the presidency, in 1940 and 1948, and had long been an expected candidate for 1952: Harry Truman had named him as such during an August 1951 news conference. Even MacArthur himself, who rarely agreed with Truman about anything, had been thinking that Taft would be his biggest obstacle.
    On paper, Taft should have been a weaker candidate than MacArthur. He had been openly critical of the popular New Deal, where MacArthur’s platform supported it (even if the general could not bring himself to say as much). He was fiercely conservative, guaranteeing the support of the right but alienating the left, while MacArthur’s policies could appeal to both sides of politics. Taft could not amass anywhere near the personal popularity that MacArthur carried among the general public. If party nominations were decided by the February Gallup poll, MacArthur would have won by a convincing margin.
    They weren’t. They would be decided by the Republican National Convention, which would be held in July. There, the decision would fall largely to the party bosses, which put MacArthur at a disadvantage. Taft was known as ‘Mr Republican’ for good reason: many of those party bosses were his close friends, as well as senators and representatives who he regularly worked with in Congress. MacArthur, by contrast, had spent fourteen years out of the country, and his relationship with those men had been limited to the occasional letter. Convincing them to vote for an outsider and against a friend would be an uphill battle.
    The solution, MacArthur decided, would be to present himself as more electable than Taft, and Ayer, LaFollette and Wood readily agreed. In the four months since announcing his campaign, MacArthur had convinced around one-third of the Republican Party’s conservative faction to back him against Taft, as well as an uncertain proportion of the liberal faction. Many liberals preferred Stassen, although their numbers were in steady decline. A far larger group held out hope for another candidate: Dwight D. Eisenhower.

    ‘Ike’ had been the subject of extensive speculation in the lead-up to the 1948 election, and even after he announced that he was not going to be a candidate, efforts were made to get him on the ballot regardless. Nothing less was expected this time around, and throughout 1951 a ‘Draft Eisenhower’ movement re-emerged.
    It was not hard to see why. Eisenhower could take a lot of the credit for the victory over Germany in World War II, capped off with a deft rebuttal of Patton’s outbursts to the contrary. He was incredibly popular among Americans on both sides of the political spectrum, possibly moreso than MacArthur. He was a full decade younger than MacArthur, and he tended to do a much better job relating to the current generation. Many pundits on both sides thought Eisenhower was the ‘perfect’ candidate.
    Certainly Harry Truman thought so. In December 1951, the president wrote to the general asking (“almost pleading”, Eisenhower later said) for him to run as a Democrat. After Truman’s politically disastrous second term, Eisenhower might have been the only person able to resurrect the party’s chances. Ike declined, believing that if he was to run at all, it would be better to run with a clean slate, untarnished by an unpopular predecessor.
    Republicans were no less keen to pull Eisenhower into their ranks. Thomas Dewey, a leader of the party’s liberal faction, had been publicly supporting an Eisenhower candidacy for more than a year now, and the prominent senator Henry Cabot Lodge had been privately encouraging the general to listen to his supporters. By January 1952, Eisenhower was starting to listen, and though he refused to announce himself as a candidate for the meantime, his opposition to running was replaced in the press with ambiguous statements suggesting that he would consider it.
    His reason for running was simple: he did not feel the country would be well served with either Taft or MacArthur as its President. In Taft’s case, Eisenhower spoke with him directly, asking the senator to reconsider his isolationist policies and in particular his opposition towards America’s role in NATO, while Taft remained firm. Eisenhower did not even bother talking to MacArthur: he had served under him for seven years during the 1930s, coming to dislike him and knowing that MacArthur likely wouldn’t listen to a word he said anyway.
    What few public statements Eisenhower did make at this time, combined with Tom Dewey’s outspoken support, suggested that he would campaign as a moderate liberal. When this was considered alongside Taft’s conservatism, MacArthur’s platform appeared to be somewhere between those of his two main rivals. Political commentators would spend the next several months debating whether this would prove to be a blessing or a curse: MacArthur’s policies could theoretically appeal to a wider range of voters, and in the event of a deadlocked convention, he would appear to be a more attractive compromise candidate than his opponents. On the other hand, he could not count on an ideologically-focused base to anywhere near the same extent as Taft or Eisenhower, and if either the liberals or conservatives took control of the party, they would back them instead of him.

    What MacArthur could count on was a tremendous amount of momentum. Campaign posters saying ‘Vote for a Hero’ and ‘Bring Victory Home’ could be seen across the country. MacArthur’s key supporters were well acquainted with owners of desirable venues. Four months of promotion had brought in ever more donations, and a lot of people’s minds were already being made up: they had been impressed by MacArthur, so they would vote for MacArthur, and the competition would have to do something spectacular to convince them otherwise. Taft and Eisenhower, by comparison, were starting from scratch.
    Four months of campaigning had also revealed where support for MacArthur was strong and where it was weak, making it possible to better direct the campaign’s time and money to where it would be most effective. MacArthur himself had already been making fewer public appearances than in the opening weeks of his campaign: a strenuous effort on the campaign trail might bring in more votes, but it would also take its toll on him physically, and at 72 he would be weakened by it far more than a younger man would (though LaFollette noted that both Taft and Eisenhower were both in their sixties). Now that he had appeared in most parts of the country at least once, it was important that future speeches be given in those areas which could deliver the most benefit to the campaign.
    There were, of course, two ways to look at the question: the presidential primaries which would begin in the spring, and the electoral vote in November. Robert Wood, the architect of what became known as the ‘Northeastern strategy’, believed both could be addressed at the same time.

    As the name implied, the Northeastern strategy proposed that MacArthur remain in, and campaign for, primarily those states in the Northeastern part of the country. 266 of the 531 electoral votes on offer would be needed in order to win the presidency, and with the present distribution of electors, it would be possible to win the presidency if every state east of the Great Plains and north of the Ohio and Potomac rivers voted for MacArthur, even if every other state went to the Democrats. This region, as it turned out, was also likely to be the area that would offer MacArthur his strongest support: the Steel Belt states had responded favourably to his labour policies, as had New York and Pennsylvania, and his rejection of isolationism appealed to the states on the East Coast, where freight destined for Europe would inevitably pass through.
    Wood also believed that the Plains states could be relied upon as a traditional Republican base - aside from the Democratic blowouts of 1932 and 1936, they had reliably voted for the GOP candidate in every election since World War I, and no Democratic blowout would be possible this year. Furthermore, MacArthur’s Asia-focused policies were thought to make securing the West Coast likely as well, which would bring him comfortably above 300 electors. The West Coast aside, the Northeastern strategy would allow MacArthur to concentrate his campaigning within a relatively small geographic area, reducing demands for extensive travel while theoretically maximising his chances for winning where it would matter.
    The South would not be a priority, and this would lead to accusations that MacArthur’s campaign was ‘sacrificing’ the region to the Democrats. Wood’s rationale for doing so was that the South had voted strongly Democratic in every election since the end of Reconstruction, and while it was not impossible for a Republican to win there - many had won a few states in past elections - it would be far more challenging to flip them compared with more competitive states. Furthermore, MacArthur had made his pro-civil rights views a known, if vague, part of his campaign platform, infuriating segregationists who still held considerable sway over the region. Though radio and TV stations would still promote MacArthur in the South, there were better uses for his campaign funds.

    Taft and later Eisenhower would take the opposite view of the South, believing that the Democrats’ control of the region could be broken if the effort was made to campaign there. One of Taft’s allies and close friends, avowed segregationist Senator Harry Byrd of Virginia, splashed hundreds of thousands of dollars on a press that was largely under his thumb to promote Taft, believing that if he could flip the state to the GOP, he would be rewarded with additional Senate influence under a Taft administration despite nominally being a Democrat.
    MacArthur kept to his focus on the Northeast. Behind the Northeastern strategy was a plan to use the presidential primaries - non-binding votes in theory - as proof that he was the most popular candidate and thus the best choice for President. There were no Republican primaries in the South. Nearly all of them would be in the Northeast.

    - BNC
     
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    Part IV, Chapter 29
  • CHAPTER 29

    “We have to win New Hampshire.”

    The Republican Party’s first presidential primary had never been considered essential to an election campaign before. Plenty of candidates before hadn’t needed a victory at the New Hampshire primary to score the party’s nomination. Harding hadn’t won there in 1920. Landon hadn’t won there in 1936. New Hampshire hadn’t even pledged its delegates in the last three elections. Surely the state, which could only offer four electoral votes in November, wasn’t vital?
    In the case of the MacArthur campaign, Phil LaFollette believed it would be. The party’s National Convention, not the primary votes, would decide who would be put on the presidential ticket, and even though he had much less appeal to the American people, Robert Taft was very much the favourite. The Convention was going to be packed with Taft’s supporters, many of them his closest friends, and they would not be easily convinced to switch their allegiance to an outsider such as MacArthur.
    When LaFollette declared that New Hampshire had to be won, he reasoned that MacArthur’s greatest appeal to the party would be his immense popularity: Robert Taft would never attract a parade of one million if he went to New York City, much less the ten million that greeted MacArthur. The best way to demonstrate this to the party bosses would be to win the primaries. New Hampshire was first, and would be held on March 11th. It offered headlines. It offered momentum. It had also voted for the winner of nearly every presidential election in the last half-century. There really was no substitute for victory.

    In the weeks leading up to New Hampshire, MacArthur held a number of advantages. While Taft campaigned in the South and Stassen tried to pull his campaign out of the disarray that McCarthy’s humiliation had left it in, MacArthur had concentrated most of his efforts in the Northeast. New Hampshirites saw him not just on posters or TV, but in their parks and halls. Frederick Ayer, who lived in nearby Massachusetts, had also been meeting frequently with his fellow New Englanders, growing MacArthur’s support there. Taft by comparison had to run everything from Ohio: it wasn’t quite a home field advantage, but it came close.
    It might have been the difference between victory and defeat. Despite six months of campaigning, MacArthur had not yet completely supplanted Taft as the assumed next Republican leader. Ayer had predicted that MacArthur could win anywhere between half and two-thirds of the state’s vote. Instead he won with just 40% of the vote, not even a majority. MacArthur’s top supporters privately believed it to be a disappointment. One of Luce’s editors called it “a stunning victory” nonetheless, which, to a degree, it was. Taft had gone into the race expecting to win just as handily, and received just 24% of the vote. If anyone had cause to feel humiliated, it was him.
    New Hampshire would also prove to be a wake-up call. Aside from a paltry 3.5% of votes going to Stassen and an assortment of other candidates, Eisenhower, who had not even appeared on the ballot, had received the rest of the votes and came in a comfortable second place. ‘Ike’ had so far remained on the sidelines of the campaign, but his dislike of MacArthur was known, and New Hampshire had been a close enough race that he sensed a chance of victory. A call to arms, which he responded to not because he particularly wanted to be president, but because he saw the alternatives as worse. On March 13th, Eisenhower formally announced that he would be a candidate for the party nomination.

    When MacArthur was told about his former aide’s announcement, he barely registered an emotion. Not only had he expected to face Eisenhower for a while, but the worst Eisenhower could do to him was win more votes in an election. MacArthur was worried about another rival with whom he shared a history reaching back twenty years and who had the potential to utterly ruin his presidential ambitions. The same day that Eisenhower announced he would run for President, Drew Pearson published some of MacArthur’s old letters. Letters he had written to his former mistress Isabel Cooper.
    MacArthur’s affair with Cooper began a year after his divorce, in 1930. At the time he was fifty, she was sixteen. MacArthur had gone to great efforts to keep the affair secret, to the point that his own mother was unaware of it, not in the least because of the scandal that a half-Filipino mistress would generate if word got out. Word, as it has a habit of doing, did get out eventually, courtesy of MacArthur’s ex-wife, who told the story to Pearson and one of his colleagues. Pearson would track down and contact Isabel herself after they broke up in 1934, and she was more than happy to tell the story, bringing a large collection of love letters with her.

    Drew Pearson was in many ways the liberal version of Joe McCarthy, with the ‘Washington Merry-Go Round’ column in the Washington Post and a show on the radio serving as his version of McCarthy’s senate floor. Pearson’s huge range of connections enabled him to find out about a wide range of scandals, which he would then publish in the hopes of discrediting political opponents. When he did not have a scandal at his fingertips, he would make one up, and when he did have one, it was often exaggerated anyway. Even after President Roosevelt publicly described him as a “chronic liar”, many of his readers stuck by him.
    Pearson had been looking to ruin MacArthur ever since the 1932 Bonus Army incident, and Cooper had given him some powerful ammunition to use. The Merry-Go Round had published a story that MacArthur was campaigning for his own promotion, to which the general responded with a defamation lawsuit (encouraged on the sidelines by none less than FDR himself). Pearson then offered an ultimatum: either the lawsuit would be dropped, or MacArthur’s letters would go public. MacArthur backed down, and for over fifteen years Pearson kept his silence, but the thought of one of his biggest enemies becoming President was too much for the journalist. He would claim until his dying day that he did keep his word, for the letters were leaked under an associate’s name, but most of the public knew that he was behind it.

    Though few outsiders realised it, the story sent the MacArthur campaign into chaos. The Bonus March itself had already been used to criticise the general on the campaign trail, although to little effect. MacArthur and his campaign had expected to be challenged on the matter, and their replies were ready before the press’ questions were. Swift and convincing answers meant that the incident, almost twenty years in the past, had little effect on the campaign.
    This time though, neither Ayer nor LaFollette had even been aware of MacArthur’s affair, there were no pre-written responses, and it seems even MacArthur had not expected this particular skeleton to come tumbling out of his closet. Now they had to scramble to prevent the story from destroying the campaign completely.
    LaFollette and MacArthur were campaigning together in Minnesota, where the second primary would be held in a few days’ time, when the story broke. Fortunately, there had been no events planned for that afternoon, so as soon as the morning’s speech had been given, LaFollette took MacArthur back to the inn where they were staying, and asked him directly, “How much of the story is true?”
    MacArthur, who was far more used to giving the orders and had never been big on confrontations, was understandably hesitant to answer, leading a frustrated LaFollette to reply “General, look, I’m trying to help you, but the only way I can is if I know what we’re facing and what cards we have, and unless we want to let this wreck everything we’ve built the last six months I need to know it today so we can try to shut it up before it gets big.” MacArthur, quite reluctantly, eventually responded “most of it.”
    That ruled out denying it entirely. Ms Cooper would be able to refute any outright lies (or so the campaign thought, as it turned out she had been killed in a car accident the previous year), and having the look of hiding something could be quite damaging to the campaign and send voters running straight to Eisenhower. LaFollette soon came up with the best alternative he could think of: whenever a reporter questioned him about his affair, he was to reply “what does this story have to do with my becoming president?” It wasn’t quite an admission of the story, nor would it be a false denial, but hopefully it would be enough to make the uncomfortable questions go away. MacArthur had been positioning himself as a man above petty disputes, especially when he was questioned on foreign policy, and there was no use tarnishing that image now. The less Isabel Cooper had to do with the campaign, the better.

    George Patton, who had no presidential campaign to manage nor a reputation he cared about protecting, had a rather different idea on how to handle the story. When he heard about it, he reacted to the news with an unbridled fury even exceeding his previous rage at Senator McCarthy. He knew as soon as he read the paper that Drew Pearson was out for MacArthur, and he wanted to defend his friend. But unlike McCarthy, who had only attacked Patton directly after a month and a half of mutual provocation, with Pearson it was personal.
    Patton’s own experience with Pearson had occurred in 1943, when the journalist became the first to publicly report on the slapping incident in Sicily. That report had almost killed Patton’s career, and it was something that Patton had never forgiven him for. His argument with McCarthy had brought the public back on his side and radio stations were desperate to get him on the air (at least after he promised a clean speech), knowing he was sure to bring an audience. A lot of the time, he couldn’t be bothered. Now, he had a score to settle. Only after securing his time on the air did he think to call his nephew about what he was planning. “Listen Fred, tomorrow the ABC will have me on air around noon, and I’m going to tear that son of a bitch Pearson a new asshole for what he said about Mac.”
    When Patton did speak on the radio, his half-hour argument proved to be more of an angry rant than a particularly well thought-out speech, but it did expose Pearson’s many, many lies. Patton discussed the slapping incident in great detail, calling out the many exaggerations in Pearson’s telling of it. He reminded his audience of the Tucker Corporation scandal that Pearson had provoked in 1948 and how he drove James Forrestal to suicide in 1949. When he finished by quoting FDR and calling Pearson a chronic liar, anyone who had listened to his tirade would be hard pressed to disagree.

    It is hard to say for certain how successful Patton was in discrediting Pearson: unlike McCarthy, Pearson would remain vocal and retain at least a significant fraction of his audience, while Patton would permanently go off the air less than three months later. What Patton does seem to have accomplished is turning the nation’s attention away from MacArthur’s flaws at a time when they would have been the most devastating to his election prospects, by making them wonder about the storyteller rather than the story itself.
    That’s not to say MacArthur did not suffer a setback. The second primary was held in Minnesota on March 18th. Though it was Harold Stassen’s home state, his campaign had been badly scarred by his association with McCarthy, something that the pro-MacArthur Hearst press reminded voters of at every opportunity. In polls collected between the end of January and March 12th, MacArthur was considered the favourite to win the state. Instead, Eisenhower would claim victory with a narrow plurality of the votes, MacArthur and Stassen coming in second and third respectively. For a campaign counting on victory in the primaries as their route to nomination, things were not looking good. The loss prompted Stassen to drop out of the race, but if anyone was to directly benefit from that, it would be Eisenhower, who Stassen began publicly supporting.

    Ironically, the man who probably did the most to undo the damage of the scandal was not MacArthur or Patton, but Eisenhower. Eisenhower knew the true details of the affair better than any other man alive besides MacArthur, for he had been working for MacArthur at the time it happened and had even been trusted enough to deliver some of the most important letters it ever produced - foremost among them a $15,000 bribe to get the now-famous love letters back from Ms Cooper, although not until Pearson had made copies for himself. As soon as Pearson published his story (and MacArthur continued to insist that it was merely a story), reporters had been hounding Eisenhower to give his side. A side that could easily have been devastating to MacArthur.
    Eisenhower had a strong sense of integrity, and seemingly still felt some small amount of loyalty towards his former boss, even despite their known animosity. When the reporters first asked him about it, he declined to comment, and when that wasn’t enough to satisfy them, and another journalist questioned him the following day, he snapped back, telling them that it was none of his business and frankly, none of theirs either. MacArthur noticed this show of loyalty: though Eisenhower would make the occasional joke at MacArthur’s expense for the remainder of his campaign, MacArthur would never again be heard criticising Eisenhower.

    - BNC
     
    Part IV, Chapter 30
  • CHAPTER 30

    When the story of Isabel Cooper first went out in the newspapers and on the radio, LaFollette and the MacArthur campaign had hoped to keep the story as quiet as possible, so that it would distract, or worse damage, the campaign’s efforts. Two weeks had passed, and already it was apparent that the strategy was a failure. Thanks to Patton’s latest outbursts, the story was no longer contained to just Drew Pearson and his followers, but had now made an appearance in most major publications in the country. Eisenhower’s refusal to back the story might have reduced the speculation, and reporters had given up asking MacArthur about it directly, but some Democrats and liberals were still openly questioning whether MacArthur was worthy of the presidency.
    A shift in strategy was in order. Patton’s attack on Pearson had been popular, so when Henry Luce called Pat Echols ahead of Time’s next issue, Echols said just three words. “Shut them up.”
    Luce, or more accurately one of his editors, had a story that aimed to do just that. Instead of glossing over the scandal, this issue of Time included a blistering attack against Drew Pearson’s story (and just barely avoiding criticising Pearson himself), declaring it an attempt to defame America’s greatest warrior and repeating a number of Patton’s “observations” of the Washington Merry-Go Round’s inaccuracies. Many times in the past, MacArthur had made some blunder, whether it be the loss of the Philippines or being caught off-guard in Korea, and the press turned him into a hero. With the article in Time, it happened again.
    Voters like to see how candidates handle crisis while on the campaign trail, and so far 1952 had been a quiet election year, making the Cooper affair one of the campaign’s most important stories. In truth, MacArthur hadn’t handled the Cooper affair well - LaFollette had needed to push to get him to admit it even in private - but that wasn’t what the media was saying. The papers told of how MacArthur was being unfairly attacked with a fabricated story by a famed liar, and how he navigated it calmly, all the while staying out of the political mud-slinging that supporters and opponents both were engaging in.

    On April 1st, the next two primaries were held in Wisconsin and Nebraska. Neither Eisenhower nor Taft challenged MacArthur in his home state directly, so it was the more competitive race in Nebraska that received the media’s attention. Taft was expected to do well there, as Nebraskans’ isolationist, conservative views aligned closely with Taft’s platform, but a combination of extensive support by Harold Stassen and a fantastic reputation of his own enabled Eisenhower to win the state in yet another close vote.

    MacArthur’s campaign team interpreted Eisenhower’s victory in Nebraska as a warning. Even with six additional months on the campaign trail, which should have been an enormous advantage, MacArthur was, at best, neck-and-neck with another popular general. There were at least as many ‘I Like Ike’ badges and posters and pieces of graffiti across the country as there were those proclaiming ‘Bring Victory Home’ - Ayer had dropped the ‘Vote for a Hero’ line as soon as Eisenhower entered the race to prevent it helping out him instead. The campaign knew that a small victory in the primaries would be no victory at all: National Conventions had in the past ignored primaries altogether, so something close to a sweep would be needed if Taft was going to be defeated. The Northeast Strategy offered some hope - New Hampshire was the only Northeastern state to hold a primary, and MacArthur had won there - but how much hope? Ayer thought it wouldn’t be enough on its own. Not if the goal was a sweep of the rest of the primaries. On the Democratic side of the fence, Estes Kefauver had so far won by a landslide in every primary he had contested. Next to that performance, MacArthur was lacking.
    Pat Echols offered a solution: they would spend big on television ads all across the country. Courtney Whitney, who had handled civil affairs for MacArthur in Japan and had recently left the Army to join the campaign, raised an objection: so far donation dollars, while plentiful owing to the huge outpouring of support in the fall of 1951, had been carefully budgeted at MacArthur’s personal insistence, and if this continued the campaign would be assured of sufficient funds to maintain its current momentum all the way to November 4th.
    Frederick Ayer, who was much more willing to ignore what MacArthur said if it would benefit the campaign, voiced his support for Echols’ idea. The election that would matter wasn’t November, which any Republican would probably win in a landslide, but the Convention in July. A defeat in July would make all those funds saved for November worthless, while a victory in July would bring in more funds as the Taft and Eisenhower camps could be expected to rally behind MacArthur in the name of party unity.
    Ayer also pointed out that a big spend such as this would benefit the MacArthur campaign far more than an equivalent effort by Eisenhower. Eisenhower’s campaign was based around large numbers of small grassroots organisations, which was excellent for attracting local communities to the cause but meant donations were scattered into small groups all across the nation, making coordination of their use more difficult. MacArthur’s campaign, by contrast, was being run in a far more centralised manner, with just about everything of importance going through either MacArthur in Milwaukee or Ayer in Boston at some point. $10,000 donated by supporters from Montana didn’t necessarily have to be spent in Montana when it might prove more useful in New Jersey. In short, if this strategy was used, “Ike would have a hell of a time beating it.”
    It would take an impassioned plea by Ayer to convince MacArthur, and only MacArthur’s reluctant approval brought Whitney on side, but the team finally agreed to spend the money. TV stations from coast to coast would soon be broadcasting short clips of MacArthur’s victories in the Pacific and Korea, his most popular policy platforms, and of course a call to bring victory home. Walt Disney, who had supported Tom Dewey in 1944, soon donated some animated ads to the campaign, placing another prominent figure in the MacArthur camp.

    The next primary would be held in Illinois on April 8th. Despite the results of previous primaries, Taft was again considered the favourite, only for the Northeastern strategy to deliver the state to MacArthur, with Taft coming in a close second and Eisenhower a distant third. New Jersey the following week would be a convincing MacArthur victory, and although Eisenhower would score a narrow victory in Pennsylvania, MacArthur would win Massachusetts in a 71% blowout, giving him five states to Eisenhower’s three at the month’s end.
    Ohio would be the next state to host a primary, on May 6th. As it was Taft’s home state, he was expected to do well there, and Eisenhower made no effort to contest the state (though Harold Stassen would campaign on his behalf). MacArthur’s advisors recommend he do the same: though Taft had been unsuccessful in every primary thus far, he would hold a great advantage in his home state, and a defeat would hurt the campaign far more than just conceding the state would have. MacArthur, who had never been the sort to just surrender a state, refused to even entertain the notion. He would be on the ballot, and he would win there.
    His strategy for winning Ohio came down to two factors: first, the Northeastern strategy had seen a lot of money invested into pro-MacArthur groups in the state, who had been campaigning on his behalf for months. Second, Ohio was home to a large number of unionised workers. Who had his name on a law that curtailed the power of labour unions, that MacArthur was promising to revise? None other than their own Robert Taft. As he campaigned in the state, MacArthur once again spoke of how he had empowered labour unions in Japan, and how he planned to do the same in America. Taft didn’t just propose to weaken them, he’d gone and done it five years ago. MacArthur’s big risk worked: he won a comfortable 58% of the vote, and dealt Taft a devastating blow in the process.
    Taft would win his sole victory the following week in the heavily conservative West Virginia, but the damage was done. Oregon was the MacArthur landslide that everyone predicted, and he proved similarly successful in South Dakota. Earl Warren, an Eisenhower supporter, would win a comfortable majority victory in his home state of California, but with eight of the thirteen primaries to his name, MacArthur was confident of victory. The people, or at least the people who voted Republican, had spoken. All that was left to do was present this victory to the Convention.

    ***

    June 15, 1952

    George Patton was back in France. He had been here many times before, sometimes to fight, sometimes merely to sightsee. He had been born here too, one time in the eighteenth century, another in the Middle Ages. It oftentimes felt like a second home to him, and he hoped to be buried here when this life finally ended, so he could rest with his men. Some fools speculated that, now that he had fought in Korea, he would choose to stay with the dead of the Eighth Army. Like hell he would allow that to happen: Korea had been a dump and Syngman Rhee was a right son of a bitch, nothing more. The place had made a perfectly good battlefield, and a death on the Yalu would have been glorious, shame that those Chinese bastards couldn’t shoot straight, but he had always intended to rejoin the Third Army’s ranks when his days ended.
    Beatrice said he spent too much time thinking about death. Well, what else was he supposed to do? He was sixty-six now. Truman didn’t want him in the army any more, and MacArthur kept talking about peace and tranquility in his speeches, so there probably wouldn’t be another war for him come 1953. The French had a war going on in Indochina against a bunch of communist rebels. Back in Paris he’d met some recruitment officer for the Foreign Legion, and half-seriously asked if they wanted him. The officer turned him down: it wouldn’t be good press for an American general to lead France’s war (even while America paid for just about all of it), and it would be even sillier to enlist him as a private. The Foreign Legion took everyone - he knew for a fact there were ex-SS amongst its ranks - but they would not take him. Peace was a hell of a thing.
    Beatrice seemed to want him to adjust to peacetime. That’s why she had convinced him to come across the Atlantic. A year and a half in America hadn’t gone well, he was out of shape now (maybe that was why the Foreign Legion guy didn’t want him?), and felt like hell more than half the time. He’d given up on writing a book about his Korean experience. Occasionally he coached polo. Occasionally he got in fights over the radio, though that was nothing compared to the thrill of battle. Most of the time he wished he had died on that goddamned river in Korea. Was this holiday in France an improvement? Maybe. At least there were battlefields to go see here. There weren’t many in California.

    So after a couple of days with Beatrice in the towns, he’d decided to drive off to one, guided by years-old memories of where he had fought before. He ended up at a section of trenches somewhere near where he had met MacArthur all those years ago. Grass and weeds had grown over the trenches and No Man’s Land between them, but behind them Patton could still sense the familiar smell of a battlefield.
    Had anyone been watching, they might have thought he looked like a lost man wandering through the debris of the past war. Somewhere near here, he had made a name for himself as the foremost authority on American tanks, and their use in battle. He had led a tank brigade to, and through, the German lines in 1918. Perhaps he was looking for a trace of that victory? A spent ammo clip, or an old long-lost letter? Or perhaps he was looking for his past…
    Silently, he got up out of the trench, went over the top, and wandered into the former No Man’s Land. Why not? There were no Huns on the other side with machine guns making such an action deadly.
    Then, after a bit of a walk, he heard a click. He’d never been one to use landmines much in battle, but he sure as hell knew what they were about. As long as he kept pressure on this thing, it wouldn’t blow. Perhaps this lowly mine, which would kill him when he moved, was what he had come to find.

    Before he stepped off the mine, he gave a quick final prayer. Its words, like the general who spoke them, were forever lost to history.

    - BNC
     
    Part IV, Chapter 31
  • CHAPTER 31

    June 27, 1952

    The so-called ‘Stalin Note’ was an interesting document. As Harry Truman read the document over for the fifth or sixth time this morning, he wondered what had made Stalin decide to send this message to him, as well as to London and Paris. If the proposal was accepted, Germany would be made one country again, with free elections supervised by the four occupiers, and while the country would be made officially ‘neutral’, it would be otherwise free to do whatever it liked. The only thing Stalin asked for in return was that Germany not be a part of the EDC or NATO.
    The deal sounded too good to be true. Barely a year had passed since he had given up North Korea. State and Defence were both completely convinced that Stalin was going to find some way to get the US and its allies back. The Middle East was a possibility, but other than Mossadegh’s dispute with the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company that region was quiet. So was French Indochina, which had been up to its eyeballs in communist rebels ever since the Japanese had been thrown out. Nor could one forget that all the Russian tanks in the world were parked in East Germany, poised to storm through the Fulda Gap. Whatever Stalin’s plan was, he was masking it well.
    Bluff, serious proposal, whatever this was supposed to be, it would be the Senate’s problem if they wanted to deal with it next week, and the new administration’s problem come January. It had taken the communists half a year to decide whether Chinese POWs would have to go back to Red China after nine-tenths of North Korea had been conquered (the POWs were eventually allowed to stay in the ROK). And Stalin had dragged his feet on this idea for a good seven years if he had ever been sincere about reunifying Germany. Truman had less than seven months left of his term. There wasn’t much chance of settling this before then. Afterwards? It was a problem for Taft or MacArthur or Eisenhower. Kefauver might have been on that list too, but Gallup’s latest poll put Truman’s job approval at just seventeen percent. Twenty years of Democrats, a war in Asia, and now the recession… George Washington would have had a hard time being elected as a Democrat this year.
    What annoyed Truman the most was that the economists were saying the recession would end just as the next fellow took the oath of office. Once again he would get all of the blame and none of the credit.

    The phone rang, and Truman was pleasantly surprised to hear Dean Acheson on the other end.
    “Well, Mr President, would you like the good news or the bad news first?” Acheson asked.
    “Guess I’ll take the bad news.” Truman said. Short of World War III, he wasn’t sure there could be any more bad news left in the world, but apparently Acheson had found some. Might as well get it over with.
    “Bad news is, we’re no closer to finding out if this Germany thing is real or not, and now we probably won’t ever know.” Acheson said.
    That was a relief. If that counted as bad news, there wasn’t any new crisis to deal with. Truman had already just about made up his own mind on it anyway. “Why’s that?” he asked.
    “The good news, although I probably shouldn’t call it that seeing as we’re talking about a foreign head of state. Old Uncle Joe’s kicked the bucket. Radio Moscow just announced it.” Acheson said. “Died in his sleep is how they described it.”
    Radio Moscow lied as much as Goebbels’ press had fifteen years ago, so the cause of death could be anything, but it didn’t matter that much. What did matter was, “Who’s taking over in his place?”
    “No idea.” his secretary of state said. “We may not even know until after the election. After Lenin died, it took three years before Stalin emerged as the chosen successor. Three candidates we think likely are Malenkov, Mikoyan and Molotov. Beria might have an outside chance. Whoever it is, he’ll be busy consolidating his power for a while.”
    “So we can forget about this Germany issue?” Truman asked. “Unless it’s going to matter before January I’d like to be rid of it.”
    “The Russians probably will.” Acheson said. “We’ll still have the Senate take a look, after that I think it will be a matter for your successor if he chooses to pursue it.”
    “Good, thanks Dean.” Truman said, stuffing the document into a drawer. “Let me know if you hear anything more out of Moscow.”

    ***

    On July 7th, 1952, millions of Americans tuned their TV sets to the live broadcast of the Republican National Convention. Over the following five days, the discussions and debates inside the International Amphitheatre in Chicago would decide the Republican ticket, and in doing so they would effectively choose the next president as well. Going into the convention, MacArthur was considered the favourite to win, so viewers were puzzled when the first event of the convention turned out to be a seating dispute between the Taft and Eisenhower factions. Why argue about who would have the honour of coming in second?
    In the weeks leading up to the convention, Taft had used his control of the Republican Party to have his allies decide the convention rules in such a way as to favour his candidacy. In particular, under the Taft rules, only those Republicans who had been party members in 1948 would be allowed to participate in the selection of delegates for 1952, which would effectively cut out those new members who had been inspired to join the party by either Eisenhower or MacArthur, and presumably give the advantage to Taft. Eisenhower’s supporters labelled this as unfair, chose their own delegates, and then challenged the party to decide which delegation would sit in the convention.
    Both groups clamoured for MacArthur’s support on the issue, and both sides were frustrated when the general refused to have any part of the dispute. MacArthur had long been presenting himself as a candidate above petty political conflict, and weighing in too heavily on either side risked damaging that image. Furthermore, it wasn’t clear which side’s argument offered more benefit to MacArthur. He had seized control of around one-third of Taft’s conservative base just by announcing himself as a candidate in 1951, but he had also drawn in a faction of pro-New Deal and labour leaders to the party, particularly in the Steel Belt, who would be unable to vote for him if Taft had his way. Nor could the possibility of a deadlocked convention be ruled out: if he backed Taft or Eisenhower here, he might alienate the group whose support could later deliver him the nomination. Playing it safe, he stayed silent.
    When Monday morning came, party chairman Guy Gabrielson called for a vote on the matter, and after hours of debate, the Eisenhower faction narrowly won out. MacArthur’s faction, such as it was for this debate, was split almost exactly down the middle, but here it had tipped the balance. Slates of pro-Eisenhower delegates, most of them from the South, were seated, and Gabrielson gave the floor to former President Herbert Hoover, who gave the convention’s keynote address.

    The much more important discussion to select the party ticket began in earnest on Tuesday, with Eisenhower on the rise and Taft’s position weakening in the wake of the ‘Fair Play’ defeat. Some papers, most notably the New York Times, boldly stated that “Mr Taft Can’t Win” against either of his more popular rivals - though he easily beat the oft-forgotten fourth challenger in the race: Earl Warren.
    What MacArthur and Eisenhower soon found was that Taft could still win. 1206 delegates would vote at this convention, so 604 would be needed to secure a majority. When the results from the first ballot came in, Taft received 399 votes. MacArthur came in second with 390, Eisenhower a still-close third at 336, with Warren claiming the remaining 81. Even if Warren instructed his delegates to vote for Eisenhower, as he was expected to do, he wouldn’t come close to tipping the balance - though Eisenhower would then be leading, he would still be close to two hundred votes short of a majority.
    A second ballot was then called to see if the three-way tie would resolve itself, only to prove a disappointment in that regard: less than two dozen Taft supporters switched to MacArthur, narrowly giving him first place, and Eisenhower gained four from the Warren camp, but the evening headlines said it best: ‘CONVENTION DEADLOCKED’.
    Undecided results after two ballots were nothing new: the 1940 convention had required six ballots to come to a decision, and in 1920 there had been ten, but both of those had seen numerous candidates commanding smaller delegations who would eventually break for one of the leaders. This time, Earl Warren might have been able to serve in that role, but he wouldn’t get anyone across the line on his own. Taft wasn’t going to concede easily: he had run for president twice before and knew that this would likely be his last chance. MacArthur was the longtime favourite and seemed to be ‘winning’ the convention, and at seventy-two he had even less chance of a future run than Taft, so he wouldn’t be stepping aside either.

    That left Eisenhower.

    As soon as the results of the first ballot had come in, Eisenhower had realised that he would not be likely to win the nomination: his fortunes were arguably at their highest ebb in months following the victory of ‘Fair Play’, yet he remained behind Taft and especially MacArthur. While he disliked MacArthur personally, their political positions were similar in most of the issues that Eisenhower considered to be important, certainly moreso than the strongly conservative Taft. Eisenhower was also influenced by popular opinion: he had only become a candidate because the people had insisted upon it, but those same people had backed MacArthur in greater numbers at most of the primaries. Thus he decided, he would offer his support to MacArthur, but only if MacArthur could swallow his ego long enough to “cross the street” and come to him. They held the same rank now. Eisenhower was not interested in being treated like a subordinate anymore.
    Although MacArthur believed he could eventually capture the votes he needed with more convention ballots, Phil LaFollette was not nearly so sure. The convention room, even after the Eisenhower delegates had been welcomed to the floor, was still filled with Taft’s close friends and allies, and there was a distinct possibility that the next ballot could swing back towards Taft, or even that Earl Warren’s exit from the race would lead to a new wave of Eisenhower support. LaFollette also reminded MacArthur that the campaign had been considering the possibility of a split vote for months. Eisenhower had effectively taken MacArthur’s side during the Isabel Cooper scandal, so he was believed to be at least open to a deal. Eventually, MacArthur allowed himself to be convinced to meet his former aide (especially after no-one came to meet him), and “crossed the street” to Eisenhower’s hotel.

    Eisenhower’s offer was simple: he would endorse MacArthur for president in exchange for one of his allies being endorsed as the running mate to be presented to the convention. Though the vice presidential role was not one of great influence, they would be the one to step into the top job if MacArthur died, a serious possibility considering his age. Eisenhower did not want to see one of MacArthur’s hardline conservative backers such as Kenneth Wherry or William Knowland taking over (the latter had been MacArthur’s private choice for months). A deal could make sure they didn’t.
    The name they eventually agreed on was Senator Henry Cabot Lodge. Lodge had been one of Eisenhower’s strongest supporters, spearheading the ‘Draft Eisenhower’ movement in the days when MacArthur had already begun his campaign. He had spent more than fifteen years in Congress, giving him a wealth of experience in government. Aged fifty, he would be able to remove any concerns about MacArthur’s age, and as he hailed from Massachusetts he could offer some geographic balance to the ticket. All in all, he was about as perfect a match for the ticket as they came.
    Eisenhower’s only concern was that Lodge might not want the job. He hadn’t been particularly enthusiastic the one time Ike had proposed it to him in the past, considering instead the possibility of another term in the Senate. Fortunately, when LaFollette telephoned him, Lodge said he would be willing to have his name put to the convention.

    When the Convention continued the following day, Herbert Brownell Jr, one of Eisenhower’s closest campaign advisors, read a statement by Eisenhower announcing his withdrawal from the race and calling on his supporters to support MacArthur. They did so in the third and final ballot, which gave MacArthur over 850 votes, including some who had voted Taft twice previously. Lodge was then nominated by acclamation, completing the ticket.
    Taft, greatly disappointed by his third and final defeat, would only offer a short statement declaring that he would support the party’s decision and encouraged his supporters to back MacArthur and Lodge. The senator himself would never do any more than that for MacArthur, a man who had spent months challenging Taft’s labour legislation and whose foreign policy he had many reservations about. MacArthur, for his part, seemed to believe that Taft would one day present himself and offer congratulations. That day would never come: within weeks of the Convention, Taft’s doctors would find a cancer that would force him to increasingly withdraw from politics and soon claim his life.

    - BNC
     
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    Part IV, Chapter 32
  • CHAPTER 32

    The results of the Republican National Convention loomed large when the Democrats held their own National Convention on the 21st of July. The Republicans had been the first to televise the entire event, and the Democratic Party had watched it carefully. Some of this information would help them set up their own campaign: they too would hold the Convention at the International Amphitheatre, and less flattering camera angles could be reconsidered in the hopes of making a better event for those watching from home. Holding the second convention would also give them more information on their opposition’s campaign: whoever they nominated would have to be the best person to challenge MacArthur and Lodge.
    When the Convention began, Tennessee’s Senator Estes Kefauver was the frontrunner, having twelve primary races to his name, although this only translated to around a quarter of the 1230 delegates voting in the first ballot. Kefauver’s supporters, like MacArthur’s two weeks prior, argued that he was the popular choice and therefore the best candidate to go against the incredibly popular general.
    The party bosses were inclined to disagree. Kefauver, they said, was a maverick and a loose cannon, who would be too dangerous in the nation’s top job. Many of them proposed instead Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, an outspoken supporter of segregation (though never one to use such explicit terms himself) who even Northern Democrats saw as too racist to have a chance at winning. “MacArthur’s going to be bashing him with the civil rights stick for the next four months” was the prediction of one delegate. Another noticed that MacArthur had scarcely campaigned south of the Mason-Dixon line in months, and suggested that the party look to someone with more national appeal instead of placing their focus in the one region the Democrats were most likely to win.
    Governor Adlai Stevenson of Illinois, who had placed a close third in the first ballot, emerged as that person. Stevenson, a political moderate, had the support of Western and Northeastern states, regions that MacArthur was known to be targeting. He was known to be a gifted orator, which could not hurt against the charismatic MacArthur. Perhaps most importantly, most of the other alternatives had some sort of weakness that would inevitably be used against them. Stevenson’s record was clean.
    The choice for Stevenson’s running mate would prove to be just as heavily debated. President Truman, although not popular with the public, still held a great deal of influence over the party, had picked Stevenson long ago, and now his choice for the running mate was Alabama’s John Sparkman. While most of the Southern delegates agreed, the same civil rights argument used against Richard Russell applied just as well to Sparkman as well. Averell Harriman’s name was also put forward, but his lack of political experience made many delegates unwilling to support him. Kefauver’s name was raised again, and many delegates were swayed when one supporter gave an impassioned plea: “four Americans in every five believe we have already lost this election, and yet here we are saying Senator Kefauver is too great a risk. Perhaps what the Democratic Party needs is a big risk.”
    A majority of the delegates, sensing no better alternative, announced that they would support Kefauver for vice president, completing the Democratic ticket.

    Contrary to the expectations of the Democrats who chose him, Stevenson would prove to be rather weak on the campaign trail. His celebrated speaking skills resulted only in graceful, long discussions of policy and scripture more expected of a professor than a politician, making him seem out of touch while also lacking the dramatic flair that often accompanied MacArthur’s speeches. In his discussions on policy, instead of spending his time on the expanded social welfare programs and anti-crime measures that set his platform apart from the Republicans, he dwelled on his plans to repeal the Taft-Hartley Act, which was something MacArthur had been vocal about for months (although MacArthur said he would “review” the act rather than repeal it in its entirety).
    Then in September, Stevenson would go on to make his biggest mistake in his campaign, when he claimed that MacArthur would “not be the best man to lead America’s foreign policy”. His argument was intended to criticise MacArthur’s proposed focus on Asia, and not Europe, as the central theatre in the Cold War, but when he followed the statement up not with a discussion about the Soviet Union and instead with a pledge to merely increase defence spending by a modest amount, he came out looking foolish. MacArthur had spent the last decade as the face of American foreign policy in Asia, and had more experience in the region than just about anyone, while Stevenson’s greatest foreign policy accomplishment was a 1944 report on the state of the Italian economy. MacArthur had also reminded voters time and again that Red China had intervened in Korea and attacked American soldiers, while the Soviets had stayed out, making the Chinese seem like a greater threat to America’s security. Stevenson, MacArthur contended, just wanted to continue Truman’s policy, and wasn’t Truman’s policy what had brought about Korea in the first place?

    ***

    MacArthur did not show any particular emotion upon hearing that Stevenson had been nominated. As far as he was concerned, winning the Republican nomination had just about put him in the White House, a view only reinforced by Stevenson’s weak showing on the campaign trail. His priority now was not worrying about the Democrats: they had already failed, but on finding the men that would make up his administration.
    He had no shortage of loyal followers to choose from. Some, like Pat Echols, had come with him directly from Tokyo. Others, especially Phil LaFollette, would come from his campaign team. Most of what critics called the ‘Bataan gang’, including men who had been with him since the 1930s, had stayed back in Japan to assist Ridgway in the final stages of the occupation, and were now retiring from the Army to follow their hero in civilian life. Charles Willoughby had scored a CIA job. MacArthur’s ever-present legal pad, once used to give out orders in Japan, now contained a list of positions for advisors, cabinet members, and other important jobs. By the beginning of August, nearly every one of them had a name written next to it. Most of the names had been worshipping MacArthur for years.
    Yet one position that would prove to be especially important in MacArthur’s presidency wasn’t even on the list. That position would be titled ‘Special Advisor to the President’.

    The Special Advisor spot has its origins in an offer Harry Truman made to MacArthur and Stevenson in the middle of August 1952. Truman remembered well how poorly he had been prepared for the presidency. He had been vice president for less than three months, and had hardly known FDR, when he was expected to fill the great man’s shoes, and big shoes they had been. Remembering the difficulty of his own transition, Truman resolved to make it as easy as possible for his successor, even if his successor turned out to be His Majesty MacArthur. So he invited the two nominees to lunch with him at the White House, meet his cabinet and be briefed on matters foreign and domestic that would be of use to an incoming administration.
    MacArthur noticed that even if this was a good-faith offer, which indeed it was, there would be strings attached. To be briefed implied that he needed briefing, an image that would not do. He was running to replace Truman’s foreign policy failures, not to embrace them. Any information he needed, he could get from Charles Willoughby. And by being photographed alongside Truman, wouldn’t that risk tying him to Truman’s pathetic legacy? So, much to Truman’s disappointment (if not his surprise), MacArthur declined the offer.
    Frederick Ayer Jr had advised MacArthur to meet with Truman, but ever since Ned Almond had returned from Tokyo, MacArthur had stopped listening to his campaign manager whenever his former chief of staff offered a different opinion. Almond was just as terrible to deal with as his late uncle had said: whenever you wanted to see MacArthur, you had to go through Almond, and Almond didn’t let anyone through unless they were as much of a crony as he. Patton had outranked Almond, and had the guts to curse out the man until he got MacArthur’s ear directly (at least until MacArthur found a subordinate Patton was willing to deal with in Doyle Hickey), so he had been the one person able to get around the chief of staff. Without the protection of rank, that method wouldn’t work here.
    Ayer knew that allowing the Bataan gang to dictate the flow of information to MacArthur would result in disaster eventually: their constant interference and incompetence had caused many setbacks on MacArthur’s battlefields. Furthermore, although MacArthur had effectively ruled Japan for six years, Ayer knew there were many differences between acting as a military governor and serving as the US President, and it did not help that, before this campaign, he had not been in the country for fifteen years. Even if MacArthur would not listen to Truman, he would be well served by an advisor who could prepare him for the job.
    Ayer thought the best person would be Herbert Hoover. Hoover was a known MacArthur admirer, who had last year described the general as “a reincarnation of St. Paul into a great General of the Army who came out of the East”. Hoover had been President before, and knew the ins and outs of the office, so his advice could be supported by that experience. Most importantly, Hoover was one of the few people MacArthur looked up to. Most Americans would have placed Hoover as one of the worst Presidents, but MacArthur rated him as one of the top four. So Ayer wrote to Hoover asking if he would meet with MacArthur. Hoover agreed, and MacArthur was delighted by the news that Hoover was inviting him to lunch.

    Hoover would not be the only late addition to the MacArthur team. The list on the general’s legal pad still had one important slot that remained frustratingly bare even as September dawned. MacArthur had spent days wondering, and had yet to come up with a suitable answer to the question: who would be his Secretary of Defence?
    The need for civilians to control the military meant that any potential Secretary of Defence could not have served in the armed forces within the last ten years, precluding any Korean veterans and just about everyone from World War II, and indeed just about everyone from MacArthur’s inner circle. The Senate could grant an exception to this rule - they had for George Marshall - but as he was a general himself that wasn’t likely to happen. Senator Knowland, one of MacArthur’s strongest supporters and a man he had once considered as a potential running mate, happened to be a World War II veteran, ruling him out. Another vocal supporter, Kenneth Wherry, was perceived by MacArthur to be too isolationist, and wished to remain in the Senate besides. So MacArthur was forced to go on a weeks-long hunt.
    He would find who he was looking for on a campaign tour of the Pacific Northwest.

    MacArthur had long been impressed with the Air Force, having been a childhood friend of the pioneer Billy Mitchell (in whose court-martial MacArthur claimed to be the sole ‘not guilty’ vote). MacArthur had built his campaign in the Southwest Pacific around the capture of land-based airfields, and heaped praise upon his subordinate George Kenney when this proved successful. In Korea, the Air Force had sent the first Americans into combat in that war, and the strategic bombing of North Korea was so successful that it had to be called off for lack of targets less than a month after it began. The Air Force, MacArthur sensed, would be at the forefront of any future conflict, and therefore the front of the MacArthur defence policy, with the strategic bomber leading the way.
    Nothing captured that vision better than the B-52. Still in an early testing phase of development, the B-52 looked promising: it could carry thirty tons of bombs, including an atomic weapon if need be, and it had the range to cover a continent and return without needing to refuel. He had been so impressed that he asked for a tour of the Boeing plant in Seattle, where he would meet the man behind the bomber.
    William M. Allen was a man of big ideas. He had become President of Boeing in 1945, just as the war orders were drying up, and quickly pushed for the company to develop passenger aircraft alongside the heavy bombers it had become known for, and just months ago he had claimed to “bet the company” on the innovative 367-80 prototype that could one day become a jet-powered airliner. Boeing wasn’t quite a military company, but it came close, and Allen’s experience could be useful in Defence. Most importantly, he and MacArthur shared a great vision of the future of air power. By the end of the day, MacArthur had decided he wanted Allen on his team. Allen would take some convincing, but eventually agreed to serve as MacArthur’s Defence Secretary if confirmed by the Senate. The legal pad had its last spot filled.

    ***

    November 5, 1952

    Harry Truman folded the Chicago Daily Tribune and put the paper down on the Resolute Desk. Election Day had come and gone. Last time, the Tribune had printed arguably its most famous headline. He only wished that ‘AMERICA BACKS MAC’ was just as erroneous a line as Dewey defeating him had been. It wasn’t. It was never going to be. In 1948, his campaign had pulled off an upset by being energetic where Dewey’s was lacklustre. This time around, Stevenson had been the disappointment.
    The results were the landslide everyone had predicted. The paper didn’t call any of the close races: those were still being counted, but none of them mattered any more. His Majesty had swept the Midwest, New England and California. When New York, Pennsylvania and Ohio were all called for MacArthur in the early hours of the morning, his victory was assured. The only question left was the margin, and with Stevenson hardly making an impression outside of the South, and with Florida proving surprisingly competitive, even that looked to be a great victory for the general who had caused the current president so much trouble.
    So this is how my legacy comes to an end. Truman thought. God help us.

    END OF PART IV

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    - BNC
     
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    Part V, Chapter 33
  • PART V: PRESIDENT

    CHAPTER 33


    January 20, 1953

    President-elect Douglas MacArthur could think of no greater honour. Here he stood, on the East Portico of the Capitol, Jean holding a Bible by his side. Out in the distance, untold thousands of people had come to witness this historic event, and many more would see it on television or hear it on the radio. Chief Justice Vinson asked if he was ready, and when he responded affirmatively, he said “raise your right hand” and began to administer the hallowed oath:

    “I, Douglas MacArthur, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. So help me God.”

    “Congratulations, Mr President.” Vinson said. And with that, it was official. The crowd roared in approval.

    ***

    Once inaugurated, the new President moved quickly to assert his authority. The first order of business was to put his cabinet nominations approved by the Senate. MacArthur had decided on all of the men he wanted in the top positions months ago, and with the exception of a couple of rearrangements the list had been final by Election Day. The Senate, split straight down the middle after the recent elections, was expected to confirm all of them without issue. Majority Leader Knowland was an ardent MacArthur supporter, and it was rare for presidential appointments to be challenged besides. Knowland had been given an envelope the day before the inauguration. It contained a single sheet from the legal pad, signed by MacArthur and listing who would go where.

    State - Henry Luce
    Treasury - Phil LaFollette
    Defence - Bill Allen
    Attorney Gen - Dick Nixon
    Commerce - Robert E Wood
    Labour - Courtney Whitney
    FSA Administrator - Frederick Ayer
    Budget Director - Joseph Dodge
    CIA - Charles Willoughby
    UN Ambassador - Ike


    MacArthur’s critics had been using the image of him ruling the United States as a military governor, or worse a dictator, ever since he announced he would seek the Presidency. His commitment to serving the Constitution had never wavered, and he had no intention of doing as they claimed, but the image remained dangerous nonetheless.
    Thus, he had decided long ago that the four top cabinet spots would all go to civilians. Luce and LaFollette had both been vital parts of his campaign, and it was natural that they would be rewarded with two of the top jobs. Luce had been floated as an option for State when Willkie had run in 1940, and MacArthur had no intention of giving the job to the otherwise obvious candidate John Foster Dulles, so the decision was easily made. Richard Nixon was someone that MacArthur had only recently met, but he looked to be a rising star in the party and MacArthur could see no immediate reason to object to the party suggestion. The Senate raised questions over a potential conflict of interest considering Allen’s recent time at Boeing, but the former CEO had already sold his share of the company and his good character convinced the Senate to approve him with a strong majority.
    Five men from the Army would get important roles in the incoming administration. MacArthur trusted them wholeheartedly, and believed they would be best placed in jobs similar to those they held in Tokyo. Whitney had managed civil affairs, and as MacArthur was hoping to achieve labour reform he believed that to be the most suitable portfolio. Willoughby had already taken a job with the CIA and had been MacArthur’s source of intelligence information since 1939, while Dodge had been his financial advisor for the last four years. Eisenhower hadn’t been part of the MacArthur headquarters for over a decade, but MacArthur felt that as Eisenhower had almost single-handedly put him in the White House, it was only fair that Ike get any job he desired in the new administration. Ike thought his skills would be best used in the United Nations, and the Senate agreed.

    The fifth Army man was someone the Senate had no say over: Ned Almond, who MacArthur appointed as his Chief of Staff. Truman had called John Steelman his Assistant to the President, but MacArthur was quick to replace it with the title he had used in Japan. Almond was no mere assistant. Taking orders only from MacArthur himself, Almond reprised his role as the unofficial second in command.
    Just as he had in Tokyo, Almond would control access to MacArthur. No-one but Charles Willoughby saw the President without Almond’s approval, an approval that would largely depend on the person having a sufficiently high opinion of one Douglas MacArthur. No criticism of the President was to ever reach his ears. Almond’s fearsome, uncompromising presence in the office that had once been used by Truman’s secretaries, would make sure of that. In Washington, as in Tokyo, Almond was the gatekeeper.
    The Oval Office, too, would be run by the rules used in Tokyo. Cabinet meetings would be rare occasions: when MacArthur sought information, typed or written memoranda were what would reach his desk. An invitation to MacArthur’s office was an invitation to one of his performances: he talked and you listened. His decision, once made, was final. Being president meant being in charge, and MacArthur had being in charge down to a fine art.
    All of this, unsurprisingly, created an atmosphere of sycophancy. MacArthur was not interested in being surrounded with advisors who offered different opinions. He had chosen loyalists who agreed with his own views. No-one had lasted long in the Dai Ichi without a minimum level of admiration for MacArthur, and he had picked his followers carefully. This time would be no different. Henry Luce had been a believer in the MacArthur cause for at least a decade, and the rest of the cabinet was quickly discovering the procedure, with some even going so far as to address MacArthur not as “Mr President”, but as “sir”.

    One prominent member of the administration who had no interest in falling into line was longtime boss of the FBI, J Edgar Hoover. Hoover had run the FBI like his own private empire since he founded it nearly three decades earlier. Having accumulated the secrets of every important figure in Washington and a good many outside as well, Hoover had bullied and intimidated his way into power, power that he held by promising every new administration that he would ruin them if they challenged him. FDR and Truman had not dared challenge his fierce independence, and Hoover was sure he could browbeat MacArthur the same way.
    Waiting for Almond to retire for the night, Hoover invited himself into the Oval Office. MacArthur, who was reviewing the federal budget at the time, simply stated “You do not have an appointment.” An appointment that Almond had orders not to give.
    Undeterred, Hoover explained “how matters were handled” by the previous administrations, and his desire to have them continue, along with the threats of what would happen if they did not. “I’m sure you wouldn’t like that to happen, would you, Mr President, would you?” he finished.
    MacArthur was no stranger to threats. He had faced down the entire nation of Japan when he arrived there - unescorted - in September 1945, faced them down and come out on top. He already knew of Hoover’s power, ironically enough it had been Herbert Hoover who had first brought the matter to his attention about a month ago. He had already decided that he would tolerate the FBI boss, for now at least. The last thing the new administration needed in its earliest days was a scandal. So he said flatly, “Mr Hoover, in this administration there are procedures. You are subordinate to my attorney general, Mr Nixon, and you are to raise any Bureau concerns with him. If you require my time, speak with Ned, and he can arrange an appointment for a suitable time.” Now get out wasn’t spoken, but it did not need to be. The president’s tone said it all. MacArthur was furious. Hoover had better watch himself, and play by the new rules, or the former general would get rid of him, threats or not.

    If Hoover needed any further warning, he needed only look at what had already happened to one prominent official who had made himself an opponent of MacArthur. That opponent’s name was John Foster Dulles, and he was widely considered to be one of the top foreign policy experts in the country. A committed Republican, he had been the heir apparent for the position of Secretary of State should the GOP win in 1952, and he had many influential supporters backing him.
    What he did not have was a suitably high opinion of President MacArthur. Throughout the Korean War, State had constantly imposed restrictions on his authority, making the war more difficult to fight than it had needed to be. Dulles, on Truman’s orders, had then been sent to negotiate with the Red Chinese when the war wound down, cutting the victorious general out of any part of the peace negotiations. It was a slight that had never, and would never, be forgotten.
    MacArthur had quickly realised that he had to tread carefully with John Foster Dulles. The 83rd Congress was split even in the Senate, and offered only a razor-thin Republican advantage in the House of Representatives, so he could not afford to lose votes early on. The Party would understand him not appointing Dulles to the State role, Luce had been one of his most important allies during the campaign, but if he unceremoniously sacked Dulles, there would doubtless be trouble. The solution he came up with would be to send Dulles to Canberra, where he could serve as the Ambassador to Australia. The Australians had played a vital role in MacArthur’s campaign across the Pacific, and remained a steadfast ally of the United States. The position had prestige, but nothing more. If there was an urgent diplomatic matter to attend to, MacArthur would attend to it himself, and any crisis wasn’t terribly likely to come from Canberra anyway. As far as the President was concerned, Dulles would be gone for good.

    MacArthur would also be quick to impose himself on the White House itself. The building had undergone a major renovation during Truman’s first term, with work being finished only weeks before the Korean War broke out. Truman had decorated it as he saw fit once he moved back in, and if there was one person MacArthur did not wish to be associated with, it was Harry Truman.
    First to go was the ‘The Buck Stops Here’ nameplate. The buck did not stop at the Resolute Desk, and the man behind it, during the MacArthur administration. Credit for victory presented itself solely to MacArthur, blame for defeat was a problem for someone, anyone, else. Truman had left it behind as a parting gift for his successor: MacArthur had it shipped back off to Missouri. In its place, the Resolute Desk would be home to three ashtrays, ‘In’ and ‘Out’ boxes that would rarely hold papers, a legal pad, and a picture of MacArthur’s father. The legal pad was brand new, everything else had come with him from Tokyo.
    Paintings, too, would be replaced. Truman had given Franklin Roosevelt’s portrait pride of place, MacArthur had it swapped out for Theodore. Robert E. Lee, Abraham Lincoln, and George Washington would also receive prominent places. Herbert Hoover would have taken Washington’s spot, but the Special Advisor believed it would be inappropriate to display the picture of a current administration official. When it came to MacArthur’s attention that Patton had hung a portrait of himself in several Eighth Army headquarters, he tasked Frederick Ayer Jr with finding the painting. The late general had played no small part in getting him into office, and his contribution would not be forgotten. A spot would be found for Patton too.
    Finally, the telephone on the Resolute Desk had to go. MacArthur had never liked the devices, far too often they reminded him of how his hearing was failing him. His father had coped just fine with plain old letters, and he would do the same. He had done the same, with no telephone ever being installed in his Dai Ichi office. If someone needed to reach the White House by phone, they could speak to Almond. The procedure would not change just because someone couldn’t be bothered to come to Washington. Not on MacArthur’s watch it wouldn’t.

    - BNC
     
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    Part V, Chapter 34
  • CHAPTER 34

    As he campaigned for the presidency, MacArthur and his allies had stated many times that, excluding former presidents, he was the most qualified man for the job in decades, on the basis that unlike Stevenson or Taft or Eisenhower, he had actually run a country before. Nor had he just helped legislation be passed the way a congressman or state governor did. For six years, Japan had answered to him and him alone, and his experience turning the country from a bombed-out ruin and fanatical military dictatorship, into a prospering democracy could be applied to the United States.
    Enough Americans had agreed with that message to vote him into office, and certainly some of the experience would apply in Washington. The men he brought over from Tokyo were also given cabinet positions most similar to their old roles: the Japanese experience had been successful after all, and why change what had worked before?
    Unfortunately, not all of the experience in Tokyo applied in Washington. In Tokyo, the only oversight he had ever had was Harry Truman and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who often went ignored anyway, and he had been free to rule almost by decree. Not so here: now he represented just one of the three branches of government. He couldn’t do anything about the Supreme Court, so he didn’t worry about them. The third, Congress, would control a lot of what he could and could not do. If the MacArthur platform was to get written into law, he would need the 83rd Congress on his side.
    MacArthur was well aware of Congress’ power: in 1898, he had seen Congress push President McKinley into war with Spain, and then send his own father to the Philippines months later. Twenty years later they had cut the Army’s budget following World War I and tried to reduce the West Point curriculum while he was superintendent there, moves he had bitterly protested. What he did not know was what the 83rd Congress in particular looked like. Some of its members were longtime friends, but they were just a few out of over 500. Fourteen years out of the country had made it difficult to track the careers of senators and representatives, and outside of a few prominent names, he did not know who, or more importantly how many, stood on his side.
    So, for one of the rare times in his entire four-year term, he summoned Special Advisor Herbert Hoover to the Oval Office. He hated asking for advice: wasn’t the whole point of being the Boss that people came to you with their questions? Though he sought it reluctantly, he did trust Hoover’s judgement. Hoover was a man he had admired for a long time: if he had to get help from someone, Hoover wouldn’t be too bad.

    ***

    January 29, 1953

    “Tell me what I’m dealing with.” MacArthur said. “You know what we campaigned on. Who’s with me in Congress?”
    “Depends what you send them.” Hoover said. “A lot of the time, I’d send them a bill, two weeks, maybe two months later, I’d usually be looking at something completely different anyway. When I sent them a request for a tariff bill, I asked for a moderate increase to agricultural tariffs and a cut to industrial tariffs. What I got was the biggest hike since Andrew Jackson was in this office.”
    “Suppose we call for a cut to the poll tax then.” MacArthur said. He wanted taxes cut as a general rule, and this one would be a good way to get his civil rights proposals moving.
    “Don’t.” Hoover said firmly. Then he repeated the word.
    “Don’t. Not until your other bills are through the Senate at least. The South will try to filibuster it - only need thirty-three to maintain one and they’ve got more than twenty guaranteed. Civil rights is going to be a fight no matter what you do, and they’re already unhappy with you just for campaigning on it. Truman tried four years ago, they held his other programs hostage until he gave in.” Hoover explained. “Push for it, certainly, that’s what you were elected to do, but go for labour or the tax cuts first.”
    “So who’s on our side with those?” MacArthur asked.

    Hoover didn’t offer any names. Instead, he began to describe the layout, as he saw it, of both Houses of Congress. The House of Representatives, he explained, would probably work with MacArthur on anything that had been mentioned in the campaign. Speaker Joe Martin was one of the most loyal MacArthur supporters there were, and while the rest of the GOP wouldn’t necessarily follow him all the time, the President shouldn’t have too many enemies. More than a few of them had been elected to their seats on the back of the former general’s presidential campaign, and hopefully they wouldn’t forget what the President had done for them.
    Democratic Leader (he didn’t like the term Minority Leader) Sam Rayburn would also be someone MacArthur could probably count on for support. “That will help,” Hoover pointed out, for the Democrats were only in the minority by a few seats and Republican unity was far from guaranteed. Rayburn was a strong and vocal believer in bipartisan governance. “As long as you don’t try to tear down Democratic accomplishments, he’ll be on your side, and bring a wing of Democrats with him.” Hoover said. “I’m sure he’s also noticed that a few of our campaign promises were things Truman tried to do, and that can’t hurt.”
    No, I suppose it can’t. MacArthur thought. He really could have done without the comparison to his predecessor though.
    “Where the House will fight you is on those labour laws.” Hoover predicted. “There’s a lot of conservatives there, in both chambers of Congress really, and many of them are proud of Taft-Hartley. Everything else, as long as it doesn’t get too radical, I think the House will back. They passed a civil rights bill a few years ago. The Senate killed it.”

    The Senate, by the way Hoover described it, would be the source of a lot of problems in the next four years. Staggered six-year terms meant that hardly any of them owed MacArthur anything for their election. The Senate was also fiercely independent, governed far more by its own traditions than any executive’s wishes, so it would be predisposed to fight anything MacArthur put before it purely on principle - a fight they were likely to win using the power of the filibuster.
    Then there was the makeup of the Senate itself. Both party leaders were new to the position: William Knowland for the Republicans and Lyndon B. Johnson for the Democrats, but they had little power on their own. The 48-48 split of seats didn’t matter either: while Vice President Lodge could break ties (about the only role MacArthur would ever give to him during his term), party lines could not be relied on. Indeed, they probably didn’t matter one bit.
    What did matter were the conservative and liberal factions. The “conservative coalition” - formed shortly after MacArthur left for Manila - combined Southern Democrats and Midwestern Republicans to form a bloc that dominated the Senate and had largely done whatever it pleased. “They’re against labour, they’re against the New Deal and the South is prepared to fight to the death against civil rights. I expect you’ll get a tax cut out of them. Everything else?” Hoover shook his head. It wasn’t going to be easy to convince them.
    Liberal Democrats, and what had been the Dewey and Eisenhower wing of the GOP, would probably be MacArthur’s strongest base of support. Hoover said there was only one problem with them: “there’s not that many of them.” Thirty or forty senators couldn’t pass anything if they didn’t have some of the others on side.

    ***

    The first major bill to reach the Senate floor would not be about taxes or labour unions or even civil rights (one part of Hoover’s advice which MacArthur took particularly seriously - he would not allow himself to fail like Truman had). It would be, as the President saw it, a bill to restrict MacArthur’s powers on the world stage.
    Republican Senator John W. Bricker was the arch-conservative successor to Robert Taft, still embittered by his hero’s defeat in the 1952 National Convention. Although he had voted for the Marshall Plan, he remained a strong opponent to foreign aid and many other forms of international intervention, as well as the United Nations. During the Roosevelt and Truman years, he had seen the executive branch take more and more control over America’s foreign policy, policy that in past decades had been under the purview of the Senate and exemplified by the Yalta Agreement. Yalta itself was no longer an issue, but the “executive overreach” was.
    Bricker’s Amendment would require explicit Congressional approval for any treaties or agreements with foreign powers, effectively seizing back the powers that the Senate had given FDR and Truman, and would force MacArthur to have Congress vote on any of the initiatives he wanted to push on the foreign stage. For a president much more interested in foreign policy than domestic concerns, this wasn’t far removed from handing leadership of the nation over to the successor of his campaign nemesis. MacArthur was furious, so he did what he had always done best: he went to the press.

    “The proposal put forward to the Senate yesterday morning by Senator Bricker of Ohio represents one of the most irresponsible pieces of legislation to ever be put forward to our government. Instead of allowing for strong and decisive action during the times that such action is needed most, Senator Bricker believes that even the most urgent of issues be put forward into a lengthy debate before any action is permitted to be taken. I have always, and will always, affirm my belief that Congress be consulted on decisions of foreign policy. That has never been in question. It is of the utmost importance however, that in times of war and diplomatic dispute, that swift action not be delayed. The first days of the Korean War were times of great enemy success, where delay could not be afforded. It was not afforded, and the rapid application of General Patton and his forces allowed for that enemy success to be turned into the most decisive rout of our times. I must ask, where would our Korean allies be today had decisive action not been taken, but entirely under Communist control? That is the danger that this bill represents. It is a danger that this country can not afford.”


    While the Saturday Evening Post and New York Times could, and did, get the public on MacArthur’s side, they couldn’t do much to influence Congress. When Vice President Lodge gave MacArthur a list of how he expected the congressmen to vote, there was good cause for the President to be concerned. A handful of liberal Republicans, as well as Knowland and other MacArthur admirers, would vote ‘nay’. That still left almost seventy senators for the bill, and against him. MacArthur’s response was a quick order to Almond: “Get me Nixon”.
    Richard Nixon had been going out of his way to prove his loyalty to MacArthur ever since they first met late in the election campaign. No doubt part of that was good politics: if Nixon distinguished himself under MacArthur, he could use that image to help him should he ever try to run for office in the future, but part may also have been a desire for acceptance by the former Senator, who had grown up in a poor family. Besides, in an administration where sycophancy counted more than official titles, what better way was there to rise up the ranks?
    MacArthur had noticed Nixon’s loyalty, but for this issue loyalty wouldn’t matter so much more as Nixon’s previous job. A month earlier, Nixon had been a Senator, and Nixon would therefore know which strings to pull to get the Bricker Amendment “annihilated,” as MacArthur insisted. Nixon was told of the urgency of the matter, and knew immediately what needed to be done. “Sir, I’ll talk to LBJ” he said.

    Lyndon Johnson had his own reasons for sabotaging the Bricker Amendment, and had begun working to defeat it even before he received a call from Nixon. Johnson was looking to advance his own power, and in a 48-48 Senate, the best way he could do that was to advance Democratic power as well. MacArthur was a notably popular President among the public (at least outside of the South), but here his own party had turned against him after less than a month in office. Therefore, if Johnson could make the Democrats look like the party that was helping MacArthur while the Republicans fought him, he could improve Democratic chances in 1954.
    Nixon thought Johnson could help him for another reason altogether: in the 82nd Congress, the Senate had been stuck in its old ways and thus particularly ineffective at getting much passed, but over the last few weeks Johnson had ascended to the party leadership and radically reformed a Senate that had always been extremely resistant to reform. Instead of continuing the old tradition of giving Committee positions to senators with the greatest seniority, Johnson had convinced dozens to give up their positions in various Committees so that younger, more capable senators took their place. Johnson had gotten more done in a few weeks than the previous Democrats had managed in years, so Nixon was sure that if Johnson was on side enough Democrats soon would be. He would need Democrats too: with the conservative Republicans following Bricker, there wouldn’t be enough votes to block the bill with the GOP alone.
    Nixon’s faith in Johnson proved well placed: when the call for votes was made three weeks later, Bricker’s Amendment fell just one vote short of passing (something Johnson had ensured specifically to ensure he got the most credit possible). MacArthur, finally, could focus not on leftover drama from the Roosevelt days, but on his own policies, which would include foreign matters. Better yet, the ‘Bataan Gang’ had a new member.

    - BNC
     
    Part V, Chapter 35
  • CHAPTER 35

    The Federal Income Tax Law of 1914 was, in MacArthur’s opinion, one of the worst laws ever passed in the history of the United States. It gave the government virtually unlimited access to the wealth earned by the hard work of the American people, and with no limitations on what that money could then be spent on. The communists took wealth from the people and decided how it was to be spent in their planned economy. No government of a free nation should have been doing the same thing.
    Unfortunately, he also knew too well that some evils were necessary, and had to be tolerated for the time being. The budget for fiscal year 1954 (beginning on July 1st, 1953) as prepared by Truman in his last days in office, envisioned around 55 billion dollars of expenditures. About half of that was made up of veterans’ payments, education, infrastructure and social security spending, and payments on the federal debt, among other things. Most of it couldn’t be touched without either legal implications or causing massive disruption to the country in some way: actions of past governments forced his hand. The rest was about $25 billion going to the military, which he had no intention of cutting, and $7 billion in foreign aid and other international spending.
    The money, according to Truman and his advisors, would overwhelmingly come from the hated income tax, and a similar corporate tax: together they had predicted $55 billion in revenue from those two taxes, and a further $13 billion in various taxes and excises. Fortunately Truman had found a way to balance the budget before leaving office - that was one campaign promise already fulfilled - indeed he had a good few billion dollars’ surplus to use, but doing things the way they had been done in his younger days and abolishing the income tax entirely was nowhere near possible.
    What he could do, and what he was determined to do, was cut the tax rates. When the income tax was introduced, the lowest rate was 1% and the highest, paid by those earning more than $500,000 a year, was 7%. At present, the half-million bracket was gone, but anyone earning over $200,000 a year had to pay a truly excessive 91%, and even the poorest Americans were paying at least 20%, a figure that would have been utterly unthinkable in 1914.

    MacArthur had ordered his Treasury and Defence departments to find a suitable lower tax rate that would allow him to maintain a balanced budget even as his new Defence policies were to be implemented. Joseph Dodge, Director of the Bureau of the Budget, had been in charge of finances in Japan, and knew what MacArthur was looking for. At the beginning of March, he had a proposal ready for the President.
    Under the proposal, the income tax would be lowered by 10% for every bracket - the poor would now pay 18%, while the top rate would be 82%. “As you have stated in your campaign, sir, taxation is an unfair burden on every citizen, and by reducing taxes equally in this manner, we would be reducing this overall burden in a fair manner.” Dodge summarised. Phil LaFollette was inclined to disagree, emphasising the need to lower taxes by a greater amount for the poor, but MacArthur found his Treasury Secretary’s arguments unconvincing: to be seen favouring one group of citizens over another would challenge the “fair tax relief” ideal. The 10% cuts would stay as is.
    The other big tax cut in the proposal covered corporate taxes. The standing rate was 52%, Dodge suggested it be lowered to 44%. That was around a 15% cut, and could be construed as MacArthur favouring business over the working classes, but this discrepancy too could be framed in terms of fairness. Truman had raised corporate taxes to pay for the Korean War, while leaving income taxes where they were, and now that the war had been over for more than a year, it was time to reverse these now-unnecessary demands.
    Dodge and the economists had used Truman’s numbers, and tested some of their own, and believed that under the new tax proposal, the federal government would receive about $62 billion in the coming fiscal year, which would leave around $30 billion for the military in a balanced budget with no changes to foreign aid. MacArthur gave the proposal his full approval, and sent what would soon be called the Tax Relief Act of 1953 to Congress.

    Congress offered little objection. Tax cuts had been a known vote-winner for as long as votes had been there to win, and these cuts were quite substantial. MacArthur supporters nonetheless pushed hard for the bill’s passage, arguing that it was the solution to the Truman Recession. That recession had technically ended around the time of the election, but economic growth was always an attractive prospect. One amendment was made to the Act, setting the corporate rate to the 1950 level of 42% rather than the 44% Dodge had envisioned, as House Republicans thought Truman’s tax hike was better repealed in full, and then strong majorities in both chambers of Congress quickly made the cuts official. The amendment would cut another billion dollars out of the budget, but that bothered MacArthur not a bit: there was a billion dollar program in the foreign aid budget that he was determined to end, and as soon as he could get a meeting with the French leadership, it would end.

    ***

    Thirty billion dollars put the MacArthur military budget roughly halfway between the nadir of Truman’s “economisation” policy and the height of spending during the Korean War. There was no war on, so there was no need for a mobilisation budget, but MacArthur was not going to neglect the military the way so many of his predecessors had. The United States had needed more than a year to ready itself for World War I after war was declared: even assembling the Rainbow Division had been no easy task in 1917. FDR’s refusal to spend even the bare minimum had left the Philippines open to invasion in 1941. The defence of South Korea (back when it was South Korea) had required pulling scarce resources out of Japan, and Patton had complained many times that the equipment he did receive wasn’t up to scratch. How many more lives needed to be lost before the country would realise the value of preparedness?
    The additional $5 billion going to the military, MacArthur decided, would go primarily to the Air Force, with a smaller sum dedicated to the Army. If war came, it would be most likely against either Red China or the Soviet Union, and neither had much ability to project power past their own coastlines. The United States Navy, reinforced by Truman during Korea, was more than up to any task that might be required of it. MacArthur had full confidence that his new Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Arthur Struble, would be able to use his existing assets to great effect.
    Chief of Staff of the Army General Matthew Ridgway was ordered to use the increased funding to finish bringing existing divisions back up to full strength: MacArthur would not suffer divisions that had four battalions instead of the proper nine. Once production of the ‘President’ series of tanks: the M47 Taylor and M48 Jackson, had time to be ramped up and distributed, remaining Shermans and Pershings could be sold to allies such as France, Israel and Korea. MacArthur also expressed his wish for existing units in Europe to be redeployed to Korea or back in the United States, although this was not to be carried out without his direct order first. MacArthur said that the Chinese, not the Soviets, represented a greater threat (“Malenkov’s Red Army is deployed for defensive action, while Mao’s sabre is constantly rattling in the Pacific”), and the European powers needed to take greater responsibility for their own defence. Besides, “If we find ourselves engaged in war with either communist power, mass mobilisation will be required regardless of the presence of a couple of divisions at the starting line.”
    If the United States found itself engaged in war, MacArthur believed that the first line of defence would come not from the Army, but from the Air Force. His Air Force had been the one military asset truly ready for action at the beginning of the Korean War, and it had not failed him, punishing the NKPA by air long before Patton had even made it into Korea. If the Red Army burst through the Fulda Gap, or the CCF lashed out at Korea or Chiang, the Air Force was to destroy them the same way it had destroyed the North Koreans. It would buy the Army time to get more boots on the ground, and it would lay waste to an opponent’s industrial base. Most importantly, MacArthur declared that there was to be no such thing as a “limited war” where the enemy was afforded safe havens the way Manchuria had been in the Korean War. Chief of Staff of the Air Force, Earle Partridge, was to attack anything that gave the enemy military benefit, and he was promised “as many B-52s as Boeing can build us” to attack them with. Use of nuclear weapons would be subject to Presidential approval (and MacArthur made no immediate changes to the nuclear program). Conventional weapons would not be held back.

    Planning to fight World War III as an enlarged Korean War was unsurprising: MacArthur had been successful in Korea and much of his policy was not greatly different from traditional US strategy dating back to the 19th century, only now with a stronger standing army as a base.
    What did come as a surprise to just about everyone who heard it was the other pillar of the ‘MacArthur Doctrine’: a shift in diplomatic policy. MacArthur had talked up “preparedness” many times in his campaign, and most people assumed that would mean either a continuation of Truman’s containment policy or a more aggressive ‘rollback’ strategy. The MacArthur Doctrine planned to do just that too… with regards to Communist China.
    He had a far bolder vision for the Soviet Union.

    MacArthur saw the Soviet strategy for dominance to be one made up of three continental axes. Though he described it as a “flank” in Soviet thinking, Asia would be one of his rivals’ two points of focus. The Soviets had already worked to successfully establish a communist regime in China, but now that they had, they would not use their best troops when allied manpower could further the cause on their behalf - allies that included communist insurgents in Malaya and the Philippines. This was the area the United States had the most influence over, with the alliances MacArthur had inherited and now the focus of his new Defence policy, and if they challenged him directly he felt sure of success.
    The other so-called flank in MacArthur’s theory was Africa. His European allies, principally Britain and France, controlled most of the continent through their various colonies, but decolonisation was inevitable and when it happened, the Soviets would seek to exploit the resulting power vacuum to install communist regimes. Owing to the long distance from Soviet borders, their efforts would be those of opportunism more than outright aggression, but Africa would be a priority and those opportunities would be ruthlessly exploited. The United States had little influence in the region, so MacArthur’s approach would be to persuade the British and French to facilitate the transfer of power to native African leaders who would support Western interests instead of communist ones.
    The ‘centre’ of Soviet thinking, he described, was Europe. The establishment of NATO meant that the Soviets had little opportunity for gains here, and thus their positioning would be defensive in nature. MacArthur saw little reason for concern here, but as long as the Red Army remained, it would create much paranoia in both military and political circles, in Europe and in the United States.

    A lot of the paranoia was centred around Germany, and as long as the paranoia remained his Asian strategies would be resisted. Though he believed the Soviets did not seek direct conflict in Europe, the existence of a separate East and West Germany was a flashpoint for tension. It had been the cause of the Berlin Crisis, and a similar division had sparked war in Korea. His solution to that problem? A neutral, reunified Germany.
    Reunification by force was not an option he sought to try. He aimed to prevent a worldwide atomic conflict, not spark one. Reunification by way of diplomacy though, that was a possibility. He had been made aware of the Stalin Note shortly after Stalin had offered such a proposal to Truman, although Truman had plainly ignored it as he did not see the document itself until he found it in the back of one of the drawers of the Resolute Desk. The Democrats had thought Stalin was bluffing, but Stalin wasn’t around any more. Malenkov was, and so far Malenkov had appeared less belligerent and more diplomatic than his predecessor. An agreement with Malenkov was worth pursuing, but only once he had the support of his key European allies.

    The time had come for his first international visit as President.

    - BNC
     
    Part V, Chapter 36
  • CHAPTER 36

    The Glasgow Conference of 1953 would be only the first of four major international meetings MacArthur attended that year. Long before becoming president, he had resolved to conduct all important foreign policy personally, unlike Truman who had let the State Department handle it. MacArthur’s relationship with State had been frosty for years, and aside from a weekly report from Henry Luce, he paid them little attention. His subordinates in Washington could handle routine matters of governing the country. He would use his own time on things that were much more important.
    Winston Churchill had been keen on having a conference between the leaders of Great Britain, France and the United States ever since Stalin’s death to determine how the great powers would handle the change in Soviet leadership. For one reason or another, past attempts had been postponed, and only in the last few months had Malenkov’s grip on the Soviet government become strong enough that he wouldn’t be soon replaced. Now, with changes in leadership unlikely in the immediate future, Churchill thought the time was ripe. He proposed a meeting in Bermuda, MacArthur suggested somewhere in Scotland instead. “The MacArthurs are of Scottish descent, and I’ve never seen the place” was the explanation he gave to the press.

    MacArthur’s chief aim at Glasgow was to convince Churchill and French Prime Minister Rene Mayer to support his efforts to reunify and neutralise Germany in line with the Stalin Note. As he had with his Defence team in Washington, he gave a grand speech about the danger that a divided Germany posed to world peace.
    “As long as Germany remains divided, the only outcome we can expect is for the country to remain a flashpoint of continual tension. No people will long tolerate the division imposed by an arbitrary line on a map. Just as the people of Korea sought unification by force, the people of Germany too will insist upon the end of their separation, using the force of arms if no other option is left for them. This is a situation the communists too will exploit, a way to export their destructive ideology into the minds of the German people.
    “The solution that we must take is to put the cork in the bottle, to keep apart the arms of the East and the West. The communist offer is for a free Germany, one that will be far more inclined to share our values than theirs. Instead of representing a dagger pointing at the heart of Europe, the German people would become your shield. Let us grant them peace, rather than watch the flames of unity turn Europe ablaze.”


    Churchill, long impressed with MacArthur and seeking to revive the “special relationship” that had somewhat soured under Truman, was quick to agree. He, like MacArthur, sought to reduce the threat of a devastating atomic war as much as possible, and believed that could be best done with some sort of agreement with Malenkov. The Stalin Note proposal was generous too, with unified Germany to be a democratic state whose elections would be supervised by the four powers. Freedoms of speech and the press would be guaranteed, and the only requirement Stalin had made was that Germany play no part in any military alliances, which would include NATO and the European Defence Community. Churchill believed the EDC would prove an unsuccessful effort with or without Germany, and the Red Army would be required to leave East German soil, so he had little reason to object.
    One concession Churchill did seek from MacArthur was America’s support for Britain’s position in the long-running Abadan Crisis in Iran. Two years earlier, the Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh had nationalised the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company’s assets within his country, worth millions of pounds and a considerable amount of prestige to the British. The British had retaliated with a blockade of the country, forbidding other countries from buying the seized Iranian oil. Mossadegh had been elected democratically, but in recent months was ruling more often than not by decree, and the British believed he was acting under Soviet influence. MI6 had been considering a coup d’etat to remove Mossadegh from power, but Churchill believed it would be best if America gave the operation its support.
    MacArthur had not paid much attention to Iran since becoming President, and he had never visited the country the way he had Indochina. Willoughby had mentioned the CIA’s (so far quite limited) involvement in Iran, but America didn’t have much influence in the country. What America did have was a 50/50 stake in the oil fields of Saudi Arabia, and any move he made in Iran could have effects there. The threat of Soviet influence was also too great to ignore: if Iran fell to the communists, what could that be but the first step in their effort to control Africa and the Middle East?
    Normally, he would have been opposed to launching a coup. Not only did it go against the principle of self-determination, but he knew that as soon as the new regime’s financial and especially military backing was taken away, some native movement would quickly rise up to replace it. He had seen first-hand the reaction most people had to a foreign occupation, his first combat action was against a pair of Filipino bandits in 1903. His democratisation of Japan had only worked because the Japanese themselves had led the majority of the effort. In Iran, none of that applied. Mossadegh was unpopular, and a pathetic excuse for a democratic leader besides. Moreover, the plan Churchill described consisted mostly of bribing Iranian officials to overthrow their own government. Finally, if he supported Churchill here, he could be sure Churchill would help him get Germany reunified.

    Prime Minister Mayer, who could only listen to MacArthur’s dramatics with the help of Charles Willoughby acting as translator, was not so easily convinced. France, he protested, had been attempting to bring West Germany into the broader economy of Western Europe, efforts that would be undone if a deal was made with Malenkov. Nor could France afford the danger posed by a resurgent Germany in a future war: three times in the past eighty years Germany had invaded, and three times France had lost a generation of men. MacArthur would privately wonder whether the French would rather lose a generation of men to the communists, but hoping to bring the French to his side, he offered Prime Minister Mayer the construction of additional air bases in France that could be used to host B-52s, and promised that French interests would not be ignored in the meeting with Malenkov.

    Nor would NATO be weakened if Germany, or even West Germany, was left out of the organisation. Whatever place France proposed to give them, MacArthur suggested be given to Spain instead.

    MacArthur had had little to do with Spain in the past: he had been studying to enter West Point when his father travelled to the Philippines in 1898, and as Spain had been neutral in both world wars, they had factored little in his subsequent military career. Truman’s distrust of Franco, stemming from Franco’s tacit support for the Axis, had similarly cut them out of most discussions about the Cold War: even now, the Spanish had been barred from the UN, NATO and a range of other organisations. Relations had improved somewhat during Truman’s second term - Franco was a staunch anti-communist after all, but they were hardly what one might consider good. MacArthur sought to change that.
    Most of MacArthur’s Spanish policy came from the German-born Willoughby, who had met Franco in the 1920s and considered him the “second greatest general in the world”. Willoughby had been passionately pushing for Franco to be included in the western alliance, and soon convinced the President to travel to Madrid. Before MacArthur left Washington, he instructed Eisenhower to begin facilitating Spain’s membership into the UN: with Stalin dead and Malenkov less hostile than his predecessor, the Soviet veto had ceased to be an obstacle.
    Franco, too, was keen to meet MacArthur and end Spain’s isolation in the world. The two men, both former generals, quickly established a strong relationship. MacArthur expressed his desire to bring Spain into NATO and to use the country as a site for more air bases, while Franco sought American loans and economic aid. NATO membership would depend on the other member states, and Belgium in particular expressed hesitation about Spanish entry due to Franco’s undemocratic government, but an agreement concerning just Spain and the United States was easily reached. Congress would have to approve the deal, of course, but MacArthur doubted they would offer much opposition. Most of them had been complaining that Truman didn’t do enough to bring Spain on side.

    Where MacArthur was perfectly willing to ignore French interests was in Indochina. In a move that nearly derailed the entire Glasgow Conference (and ensured Mayer would only give the resulting agreement to meet with Malenkov begrudging approval), MacArthur declared that he would be cutting all aid to the French war effort almost immediately, a sum that had come to around a billion dollars a year. The only concession he was willing to commit on this matter was to give American assistance to any French efforts to evacuate their troops, and to offer to mediate the peace conference with the rebel groups.
    As he did so, MacArthur claimed that Congress was forcing his hand by cutting the foreign aid budget (while neglecting to mention the tax cuts that had made that budget cut a priority). Mayer would soon explain to the French press his own interpretation: “President MacArthur is under the impression that, because he travelled to that part of the world once almost fifty years ago, he now knows what the people there want, and I’m not even sure if he ever set foot in Indochina itself.”
    Once MacArthur decided that the French would have to leave, there was little Mayer could do but accept the President’s paltry concessions. American aid was paying for just about all of the war effort, and using the French treasury to make up the difference would quickly bankrupt a country that was still recovering from World War II. As he agreed to MacArthur’s offer to mediate the agreement, Mayer knew he had very likely committed political suicide: the Fourth Republic had already gone through ten different prime ministers, and they would not need long to find an eleventh.

    The Geneva Conference, which began on July 13th, would soon prove to be far from the honourable withdrawal that MacArthur had envisioned it become. Mayer’s government had survived long enough for him to send an ambassador to represent France, although the prime minister refused to attend himself. The French-backed State of Vietnam led by Emperor Bao Dai also sent a representative, as did the UK. On the communist side, the Vietminh sent a delegation to represent the armies that occupied most of the colony, while both the USSR and Communist China also ensured their voices were heard.
    The Vietminh offered no objections to MacArthur’s proposal that French forces, including POWs and any French civilians who wished to return to France, be permitted to withdraw undisturbed, and all powers believed that the end of September would be sufficient time for this to be achieved. The creation of the neutral states of Laos and Cambodia was similarly uncontroversial, and having secured these agreements, MacArthur flew back to Washington. He had accomplished what he sought out to do.

    The Vietminh had not. French withdrawal, to them, meant total withdrawal from all of Vietnam, including the disbanding of what they considered to be a puppet government. That ‘puppet government’s representatives, who had over 100,000 Vietnamese fighting on their behalf for a non-communist Vietnamese State, fervently disagreed and demanded that France be allowed to turn over its weapons to its forces instead.
    In an effort to prevent a civil war breaking out in the former colony, the Chinese proposed a partition of the country into North and South, divided at the 17th parallel, with French weapons being handed to whichever government would control the local area. Henry Luce, who had taken over from MacArthur as America’s representative, expressed his government’s opposition to a partition: MacArthur was working to end the partition of divided countries, not create new ones, and Korea was proof that partition just meant a delayed war.
    The alternative to delayed war soon proved to be immediate war, as negotiations broke down following the French decision to surrender their weapons to the non-communist armies. The Vietminh were the first to walk out of the conference, with one ambassador saying “let them go, we can win without those guns.” The borders with Laos and Cambodia had been (mostly) agreed upon, those between the two Vietnamese governments would be wherever the armies stood.
    MacArthur remained unwilling to intervene militarily in the Vietnamese affair, knowing that if he gave his support to one side and then they lost anyway, future negotiations would become much more complicated. “We shall wait for a winner” was the policy he gave his State Department.

    - BNC
     
    Part V, Chapter 37
  • CHAPTER 37

    August 16, 1953

    West Berlin. It was a city deep behind the Iron Curtain, but spiritually far from the communist world. It was where East and West met, and where the leaders of both groups would meet for the first time since Potsdam. It had once been the heart of Germany, and if negotiations went well here it would be the heart of a new Germany once more.
    MacArthur was glad that the people in charge of Presidential transport had finally disposed of the Independence. When Harry Truman had been in charge, this city had been a site of the greatest tensions to occur between the destruction of Nagasaki and the war in Korea. MacArthur had no intention of repeating his predecessor’s actions, his predecessor’s mistakes. He was here on a mission of peace, and he hoped the new Bataan III could represent that in a way that Independence never would.

    In addition to himself, Malenkov, and the many translators and journalists, the great, circular, conference table would seat several other important officials from the four great powers: Churchill was once again a welcome sight, as was his deputy and foreign minister Anthony Eden. Prime Minister Pierre Mendès France replaced the ousted Mayer to lead the French delegation, and had promised to keep to the agreements made with his predecessor. On the Soviet side, Foreign Minister Molotov, and Party Chairman Kaganovich would not just support their boss in the negotiations, but MacArthur soon noticed they would do most of the talking for him as well. Malenkov would prove to be a man of few words, but also one who needed few. Clever and fearsome, Churchill would later remark “it wasn’t hard to see how he replaced Stalin.”
    MacArthur’s view of his Soviet counterpart was more charitable, thinking the new leader much more agreeable than the old after a conversation on the first day in which he related a story from 1945:
    “I hope that the new generation never has to see the disasters of war that we have been unfortunate enough to witness. My home in Manila was destroyed before my eyes, the acrid smoke left behind a reminder of the great tragedy around us, of a city not yet entirely free. We cannot have this happen again, no more German homes, no more American homes, no more Russian homes, turned to ashes because of the failure of diplomacy.
    “Sixty years ago, our troops did not stand opposite each other across a battle-scarred nation, instead our nations considered each other amongst our closest friends.”
    Then Malenkov, who had so far given no indication as to how much English he understood, replied, “Sixty years from now, I hope both our peoples will continue to say that.”

    ***

    Malenkov’s primary goal at West Berlin was to keep the Allies at the table, and sincerely hoped for an agreement that would create a neutral, unified Germany. Although he hid it well, he knew that the Soviet Union was outmatched by the West in just about every military and economic factor of importance, and therefore decided that detente would be the best way to advance Soviet interests in the world. There weren’t many ways more likely to achieve detente than a neutral belt of nations crossing the entirety of Central Europe. Malenkov also knew that East Germany was as much an economic burden on the Soviet Union as it was a military advantage, and if that was the only price for convincing the West to abandon the far more valuable West Germany, the Soviet Union would be getting a bargain. In these circumstances, even a ‘bad’ deal would be better than no deal at all.
    MacArthur would plainly need little convincing: whether he was driven by an almost obsessive antipathy towards the division of nations, his own stubbornness, or something else entirely, he was determined to find a way to unite Germany. He had used this conviction to pressure the British and especially French into following his lead (after all, would France really choose West Germany over the United States?), but Malenkov knew that would only get so far. They, unlike MacArthur, expressed serious concerns about the possibility of a Fourth Reich rising (a concern Malenkov himself shared) and would only accept a unified Germany if said state could not pose a threat to them in the future.

    Malenkov therefore decided that the best proposal he could begin with would be one that was relatively generous towards the West. First, a peace treaty would need to be negotiated and signed by the four powers and the present German governments. Then, a free election would be held, using the same system as used in West Germany in 1949 and supervised by the four powers, to determine the makeup of the united German government. Germany would have freedoms of the press, assembly and speech guaranteed in its new constitution, would be free to trade with whatever powers it chose, and would be permitted to maintain a military open to all citizens except senior ex-Nazis. A similar system would be used for Austria as well, and the two nations would be prohibited from uniting with each other, or from making military agreements with any other nation without the consent of the four powers.
    Churchill raised the first objection, saying that the free elections would have to come before any peace agreement, a point which both Mendès France and MacArthur agreed with and Malenkov was willing to concede. The second objection came from Mendès France, who sought more stringent arms limitations for the new German state and even suggested disarming the nation entirely.
    MacArthur’s initial response to this was three words long: “It won’t work.” Mendès France demanded to know why not, saying that a disarmed nation could not go on the warpath as Hitler or the Kaiser had done. MacArthur did not even wait for the Frenchman’s remarks to be translated before he began explaining his rationale: the Germans were a proud people who would want their country to seem influential in the world - this was no small part of why reunification had to happen in the first place - and dictating the number of men in their armed forces would just build resentment towards the four powers. In the long run, they would probably ignore such limitations anyway, just like they had after Versailles. He then proposed that the German peace treaty include a point similar to the Japanese Article 9, whereby the German people would renounce war as a means of settling disputes, permitting the military only as a self-preservation force. It could be theoretically unlimited in size, but prohibited from developing nuclear, biological or chemical weapons. This policy had been so far successful in Japan, and all four leaders hoped it would work in Germany as well. If it didn’t, Allied and Soviet nuclear weapons would still be available to prevent the next Hitler. To secure French approval, MacArthur offered American funding for the French nuclear program.

    The last matter of discussion would be that of the new German borders. In the East, the Oder-Neisse line agreed at Potsdam had only been intended to be temporary when they were drawn up. MacArthur was quick to say that this was a matter for the Soviets to decide: it was their border after all. Malenkov meanwhile maintained that he could not accept anything east of Oder-Neisse, and had been under the impression that that would be the permanent border ever since Potsdam. In the west, too, the borders for the new Germany would be the same as they currently stood for the divided state, and Germany would be required to renounce any and all claims to territory outside of those borders as part of the peace treaty.
    The question was asked more than once: what if the Germans didn’t accept the deal that was presented to them? Konrad Adenauer, Chancellor of West Germany, was a known skeptic of the Stalin Note and could be expected to rebuff reunification efforts. MacArthur brushed the concerns aside: “The new election will settle the matter. If he wins and does not resign, he will be acknowledging his role as the leader of a united Germany. If he does not win, or he resigns and someone takes his place, whoever does will be doing the same, and we can make our agreements with them.”
    Then, after two weeks of intense negotiation, Malenkov announced “I think we have a deal.” MacArthur preferred the term ‘victory’.

    ***

    He would return home to the very opposite.

    MacArthur’s White House had always been very much MacArthur’s White House, with him personally dominating events in the building at every turn, but beyond the bounds of the White House walls his administration was one of two conflicting methods of governance.
    The first was a “hands off” role for the executive that had not been seen since the days of McKinley and Cleveland. MacArthur believed that Congress had been designed, and its members elected, to make the laws of the land. That wasn’t the President’s job. Compared to his predecessors, he very rarely vetoed bills or even signed executive orders, and he was content to give Congress a much larger degree of independence than it had had since the first decade of the century. When he did not feel strongly about a particular issue, which applied to the vast majority of domestic policy, he would let Congress sort matters out for itself.
    The second, opposite, method came into play when he did have a strong opinion about a matter. Particularly with regards to foreign policy, he would insist on micromanaging subordinates when he did not simply handle the issue entirely himself. Those subordinates, who often went ignored regardless, had been chosen for their loyalty to the President.
    When the President was absent however, as was the case in late August 1953, the system quickly fell into chaos. Vice President Lodge had needed little time to fall out of MacArthur’s favour, so Ned Almond was put in charge, and Almond, unlike MacArthur, had the loyalty of no-one. Professional politicians hated him for preventing them from forcing their views on MacArthur the way they had on Truman, the cabinet hated him because he seemed inept at handling government affairs, Whitney hated him because he competed for MacArthur’s favour, and without MacArthur around as a unifying figure, communication between the various factions quickly broke down.

    But no two men in the MacArthur administration despised each other more fervently than Ned Almond and Charles Willoughby. They had first met, not in one of MacArthur’s headquarters, but in Kansas in 1929, and their feud had begun there. Each thought the other was arrogant, incompetent, and many other negative things. Both sought to be MacArthur’s favourite, producing even more bad blood between them. Willoughby thought Almond, who had joined MacArthur’s staff in 1946, had no place being there as a latecomer, while Almond resented Willoughby’s persistent efforts to imitate his Prussian heritage. One of Almond’s staff officers, when discussing Willoughby’s failure to warn MacArthur about the incoming Chinese forces in Korea, had suggested that Willoughby belonged in jail, and his boss would not have disagreed.
    It should have been little surprise then, that when the two men were expected to work together, the result was a disaster. Its name was Ajax.

    MacArthur’s support for the plan to overthrow the Iranian government had been lukewarm at best, only agreeing to it at Glasgow so Churchill would not stand in his way at West Berlin. As he did with everything he didn’t want to be bothered with, he quickly shuffled the task onto his subordinate, and as Willoughby was the CIA Director, it was now his problem. Then when MacArthur left for Europe, Almond was told to watch over him. Almond made a half-hearted attempt to do so, which resulted in a spectacular quarrel, and then refused to have anything more to do with the intelligence chief.
    Willoughby meanwhile proceeded to utterly mismanage the plan. He began by overruling CIA officials such as Kermit Roosevelt Jr, who had helped create the Ajax plan in the first place: MacArthur had entrusted him with this responsibility, so he would be the one who oversaw the plan’s execution. Then he let his paranoia get the better of him. While many in the American government saw Iran’s recent nationalistic moves, such as seizing the Abadan oilfields, as part of a communist plot sponsored by the Soviet Union, Willoughby also came to believe that this plan was somehow part of a British conspiracy as well, aimed at somehow subverting American influence in Iran and the Middle East in general. To avoid this, he decided the coup would be carried out with a minimum of British influence, and he ignored MI6 reports that had been sent to him and was reluctant to send his own.

    The coup, as planned, would have seen the Iranian Shah dismiss Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh and appoint the pro-Western General Fazlollah Zahedi in his place, with CIA dollars being used to bribe key Iranian officials into going along with the plan. When Mossadegh, who by this time had ruled largely by decree for a year, dissolved parliament, the indecisive Shah decided to support the plan, and the order was given to plotters in Iran to begin.
    Unfortunately for the CIA, word had gotten out in Iran, and Mossadegh knew what was coming. Colonel Nematollah Nassiri, the commander of the Imperial Guard, was sent to Mossadegh with a message informing him that the Shah had dismissed him in favour of Zahedi. Mossadegh instead had Nassiri arrested, an action that sparked crowds of thousands to take to the streets in protest. The Shah panicked, and fled the country for Rome, never to return.
    CIA agents in Iran had to scramble to save the failing coup before the situation spiralled out of control. A plan was proposed to bribe some Iranian officials into launching a false-flag “communist revolution”, which would be blamed on Mossadegh and his ruling Tudeh Party, and give the Army an excuse to crack down on the Prime Minister and give Zahedi control of the government. The only issue was that Willoughby had failed to send anywhere near the amount of funds that such an effort would need. As the crowd in Tehran took control of the situation into their own hands, the CIA agents had no choice to flee.

    Theirs had been only one of three plans to replace Mossadegh that week.

    The second came from the common citizens, who had tired of Mossadegh’s dictatorial rule and inability to end the economic crisis that the British blockade had caused. As many had done in past societies, these citizens formed a mob, which fought through those Mossadegh supporters who took to the streets, and when they found the Prime Minister, they beat him to death with a variety of improvised weapons. General Zahedi, who had waited in an Army barracks until this point, then declared himself the new Prime Minister, citing the Shah’s order.
    That set the stage for the third plan. Word of the CIA coup had not just spread to Mossadegh, but to members of his party as well, including a faction of hardline communists who now sought to take control for themselves. Knowing that Mossadegh was unpalatable to the public, and expecting Zahedi to attempt to seize control as soon as Mossadegh was toppled, they decided to declare the events as an “illegal military coup”. The proper successor to Mossadegh had to come from his party - the Tudeh - and the party had chosen Reza Radmanesh as his replacement. Radmanesh called on forces loyal to “Iran’s democracy” to take up arms against the “traitors”. Although he had convinced the Soviet government to provide him with financial aid, which he used to buy weapons, he was wary of turning the entire Army against him and sparking a civil war which he would be doomed to lose. To that effect, he ordered that pro-Tudeh forces not attack Army barracks, and only those soldiers who came out to fight on Zahedi’s behalf were to be branded as traitors.
    For four days, Tehran would be engulfed in either a very large riot or a very small civil war, before General Zahedi himself would be captured and shot by Tudeh forces. Radmanesh described the events as the “thwarting of an insurrection”.

    American newspapers had a rather different view. MacArthur had returned to news that Iran had “fallen to communism”.

    - BNC
     
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    Part V, Chapter 38
  • CHAPTER 38

    Truman’s government had been undone by the charge that he “lost China”. From the middle of 1949, the last President had been buried in a wave of unending criticism, facing calls to increase defence spending, to remove communist agents from Washington, and implement all sorts of other policies that would strengthen America in the Cold War. Republicans had controlled Congress and they had stood in the President’s way at every turn. MacArthur was very familiar with the whole affair: at times he had even encouraged it from the sidelines.
    Now he was facing a similar movement himself. Drew Pearson had needed less than a day to start complaining about “losing Iran”. The hawks wanted him to do more to help Emperor Bao Dai, who they had been happy to abandon just a few months ago but now saw as a key anti-communist following the fall of Hue to the Vietminh. The Southern Democrats had taken advantage of MacArthur’s absence to filibuster his civil rights bill to defeat in the Senate, further cementing their status as the President’s least favourite people in Congress. MacArthur had no intention of being the next Harry Truman: he would need scapegoats for this fiasco. Senator Richard Russell was the obvious problem in Congress, but one that wasn’t worth MacArthur’s time - the South had been fighting civil rights efforts since Grant left office, and this was just one of many. Hue could be blamed on Bao Dai’s generals, and MacArthur made clear that American soldiers would not die to prop up an old colonial regime that could barely keep itself together. That left Iran.
    The obvious scapegoat for Iran was Charles Willoughby, but MacArthur had no intention of firing his CIA director, who ranked alongside Nixon and Almond as one of the most loyal members of his government. He had known since his Manila days that Willoughby was a lousy intelligence officer, but he also knew that Ajax had been a bad plan from the start, and one that he had only agreed to to keep the British happy. The communist plot everyone had feared was indeed there, and it was just unfortunate that it had not been stopped in time. Besides, if Willoughby was fired and replaced by someone more competent and less loyal, he could very easily wind up with another J Edgar Hoover on his hands.
    No, Willoughby would not go. His deputy, another old problem, could take the fall instead.

    Allen Dulles had only lasted as long as he had in the administration because of his connections to the rest of the Party. He had believed that, with the swearing in of a Republican administration, he would be awarded the top job in the CIA, and was upset at having Willoughby promoted over him. Willoughby and Dulles clashed almost as a matter of routine, and Willoughby had responded by cutting Dulles out of any and all important decision making. One proposal made by Dulles, which had received MacArthur’s attention as early as March, had long been a point of contention: Willoughby, on MacArthur’s orders, had shut the effort down. Dulles insisted on pursuing it anyway, believing it to be a matter of the utmost security concern.
    Dulles wanted to overthrow the President of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz. Arbenz had attracted the CIA’s attention soon after his election in 1950, after he embarked on a program of land reform that included the seizure of vast amounts of land held (and not used in any meaningful way) by the American-controlled United Fruit Company. The Company had undervalued the land for tax purposes, and thus felt they had been undercompensated when Arbenz seized it.
    When MacArthur had been first told of ‘Operation PBSuccess’, as it had come to be known, he had not been impressed. The UFC had been blatantly exploiting the Guatemalans for years, their profits double the government’s entire tax revenue. Arbenz, meanwhile, didn’t seem to be a particularly problematic politician: his proposals weren’t much different to reforms MacArthur had himself implemented in Japan, and if there were a few communists in Arbenz’s government, they were there because the Guatemalans had voted them in. MacArthur had done nothing for the time being, concerned that an invasion of Guatemala would complicate negotiations with Malenkov about Germany, but he had Nixon investigate the Guatemalan affair to make sure Arbenz was indeed not a threat.
    Instead, Nixon found what he called “UFC Corruption”. Dulles sat on the UFC’s board of directors, and clearly had a personal interest in the matter. MacArthur was no stranger to corporate lobbying - the Hearst machine had helped fund his campaign - but this crossed every line there was.
    A short note, written on the legal pad and handed to Almond to pass on, would request Dulles’ resignation. Dulles provided it, but not without a warning. “I don’t know how you kept that man on your staff for fifteen years, Mr President, but if I were you I’d ask for his resignation too. If you don’t, I expect the day will soon come where he provides you with an even bigger crisis than Iran. Willoughby is a disaster in the making.”
    MacArthur ignored him. All Dulles wanted was to start another war. MacArthur had been elected to bring peace, and that was what he was determined to do.

    And that was what he had done. On October 18th, Germans on both sides of the old Iron Curtain went to the polls to elect the first government of the newly unified nation. In the lead-up to the election, Drew Pearson and other critics warned of communist interference, sabotage, fraud and other problems that would derail the event, claims that became ever more shrill when Soviet officials crossed into West Germany or whenever a prediction came out that gave Walter Ulbricht any significant share of the vote.
    There had been no reason to worry: American, and for that matter British and French, officials were also present at every polling booth, and not one reported any incident that threatened to seriously jeopardise the election. When Erich Ollenhauer, and a coalition of SPD and FDP members, emerged as the winner, MacArthur called it a “triumph of democracy”, while Pearson shifted his narrative to one that labelled Ollenhauer an agent of communism. (“Oh well,” Pat Echols would remark, “ever since Joe McCarthy drank himself to death, someone had to fill his place.”). Ollenhauer’s first act as Chancellor would be to sign the Treaty of West Berlin, which would put an end to all forms of Allied occupation of Germany by the end of January 1954.

    The event that would finally distract MacArthur’s critics would not be Germany, or the virtually unnoticed departure of Allen Dulles, but a ruling by the Supreme Court.

    ***

    As he ran for President, MacArthur had spoken out in favour of civil rights on a number of occasions, but his view of the matter had never been so clear cut as the news reports that followed them would suggest. Like all American veterans except for the newest of recruits, his service had been with an Army that fully embraced Jim Crow segregation, a system that both Willoughby and Almond, his two closest advisors, ardently supported. His mother, who had scarcely left his side until her death in 1935, had been the proud sister of four Confederate soldiers, and it was her influence that had led him to give Robert E. Lee a prominent place on one of the White House walls. He had spent two decades in Asia, where he grew fond of the people and cultures of the continent, and was personally relatively free of prejudice, but wholeheartedly taking up the flag of the civil rights cause would mean going against many of his roots. Throughout 1951, he had spent many hours pacing around his hotel room deciding whether he would support it at all.
    He decided to, not for moral reasons (though he did agree with those), but for political ones. As much as he was his mother’s son, he was also his father’s son, and his father just so happened to have been a prominent Union soldier during the Civil War. The South’s antipathy towards the father had extended to the son: in 1925 he had gone to an Atlanta church, only to see three-quarters of the congregation walk out upon finding out he was there. He didn’t expect to win too many Southern votes, while supporting civil rights would win more votes in the North. It made too much sense not to.
    Once elected, he had quickly become distracted by the negotiations with Malenkov, and when his civil rights bill (written entirely by subordinates) died in the Senate, the South believed that MacArthur had been beaten the same way that Truman had, and that the 1953 bill would be the last of its kind for at least four years. MacArthur had barely paid the bill any attention while it was being written. Who would expect him to make the effort of another?

    One person who did expect more was Walter F. White, leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People. White knew, based on MacArthur’s statements about the people in Asia, that the President’s statements about civil rights were sincere. If MacArthur wasn’t fighting more strongly for them, wasn’t that just because he believed himself to be a foreign policy president? Indeed, with the exception of the tax cuts and the Bricker Amendment, he’d left just about all domestic policy to Congress, and civil rights were no different in that regard. Bricker was proof that he would fight relentlessly once convinced that something was worth a fight, and he had never taken well to having his plans thwarted. MacArthur, White believed, just needed to be talked back into fighting for civil rights. So White asked for, and was granted, a meeting with the President.
    He soon found out that MacArthur could not be talked into anything he hadn’t already decided to do. White’s meeting, like so many meetings before it, consisted largely of MacArthur giving a grand performance and listening little to the concerns of his audience. MacArthur was frustrated, angry even, with the Southern Democrats and especially Richard Russell. He expressed his desire to see more progress made in the field of civil rights. But his job as President was to execute the will of Congress, not impose his own will upon it. MacArthur promised to keep supporting the cause, but there was only so much he could do. White thought the meeting a disappointment.

    Less than a month later, Chief Justice Fred Vinson died, and MacArthur had the opportunity to make his first nomination for the Supreme Court. Ever since the 1946 ruling of Morgan v Virginia, which declared segregation on interstate bus lines unconstitutional, the Supreme Court had become a source of hope for civil rights activists: while the South ignored Morgan, the day might come where the Court struck down segregation, in all its forms.
    In the wake of Vinson’s death, a number of civil rights activists wrote to MacArthur, urging him to consider this as he made his decision for Vinson’s replacement. If a liberal such as Elbert Tuttle or Roger Traynor was appointed to the bench, they could advance the cause where Congress would not. The Senate would have to approve whoever MacArthur chose eventually, but they would not be in session again for another four months, and it would be difficult for the South to justify overturning a recess appointment once the justice distinguished himself on the bench. In theory, he could appoint almost anyone, and the Senate would have to accept.
    MacArthur’s response to these letters, given in a press conference, needed only six words. “I will not politicise the courts.” FDR had tried to pack the Supreme Court, he said, MacArthur would not do the same. In the same speech, he announced that his choice was Orie L. Phillips, the Chief Judge of the Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, who had previously been considered by both Hoover and Truman for the nation’s highest court, and was one of the country’s most respected judges.

    Less than three months would pass before Phillips was forced to intervene in one of the most political issues there was: school segregation. The collection of cases that came to be known as Brown v Board of Education had first been heard shortly after MacArthur took office, but no result had been reached. All but one of the Court’s justices was opposed to segregation, but Associate Justice Felix Frankfurter believed only a unanimous decision to outlaw segregation would prevent the South from using the dissenters as an argument to delegitimise the ruling.
    When the case was reheard in December 1953, Phillips, although unenthusiastic about pushing too forcefully with desegregation, agreed with Frankfurter’s reasoning. The two spent months working to convince the holdouts, especially Associate Justice Reed, until finally a unanimous ruling was reached. The idea of “separate but equal” was declared unconstitutional in public schools, and MacArthur took the opportunity to make a number of press statements in favour of the ruling.
    Then the President’s enthusiasm faded. He had other legislative priorities, and those would not be helped by a showdown with Richard Russell over civil rights. The South, as in the Morgan case, ignored the ruling whenever it could get away with it, and for all of the President’s rhetoric, MacArthur plainly wasn’t going to force the issue.

    Not yet.

    - BNC
     
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    Part V, Chapter 39
  • CHAPTER 39

    At the beginning of the occupation of Japan, MacArthur had presented the new Prime Minister Shidehara with seven reforms that he believed would advance the cause of democracy and rebuild Japan into a prosperous, modern country. The first had been to give women the vote. The second was to encourage the formation and growth of a labour union movement. American women had been granted the right to vote in 1920. Organised labour’s rights had grown during his lifetime, but in 1948 the Taft-Hartley Act had curtailed union power significantly.
    Labour unions, MacArthur believed, were a sign of a well-functioning economy. Capitalism was most successful in raising the peoples’ living standards when you allowed those people the greatest freedom to engage in creative enterprises. Unions were both a way for workers to protect themselves from exploitation and abuse, and a sign that those people were taking control of their own prosperity. Government’s purpose was not to impose restrictions on these liberties, merely to ensure neither industry’s owners nor its workers grew so powerful as to be able to take advantage of the other. Taft-Hartley had tipped the scale too far in the owners’ favour.
    Most Republicans had voted for Taft-Hartley and then voted again to override Truman’s veto, and many of them believed it had not gone far enough to weaken unions. MacArthur had stood alone, defying his party as he took a pro-union platform to the campaign trail. When the votes were counted, it was labour’s votes in Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York that had helped propel him to the nation’s highest office. He returned to the Republican Party with a mandate: the American people wanted labour reform.

    He would need it. If the 1948 vote was anything to go by, he had perhaps half of the Democrats in Congress, and few if any Republicans, on his side in the labour battle.
    MacArthur had hoped to put a labour bill to Congress during his first year in office: his mandate was strongest immediately after the election and would only decline with every day that passed. His Secretary of Labour, Courtney Whitney, had been put on the job, only for other events to take over the administration’s attention: first the Bricker Amendment, then MacArthur’s foreign trips, all the while cabinet members clashed with both each other and with Ned Almond. It soon became apparent that there would be no MacArthur labour law in 1953. The President was determined that there would not be such a delay in his second year.
    Whitney’s first draft of the new Labour Unions Act 1954 arrived on his desk shortly after MacArthur announced he was nominating Orie Phillips to the Supreme Court. The proposal was heavily based off the Japanese Labour Standards Act of 1947, and envisioned a fairly broad repeal of many Taft-Hartley restrictions. It was bold in vision, but both the President and the cabinet members who saw it immediately knew that it was not practical. Richard Nixon didn’t need to read more than the first page before he declared “Sir, Congress won’t even waste their time with a vote on this.”
    Whitney asked him why not, and Nixon replied with another question of his own: “Who would vote for it? In the Senate, we’ve got the twenty or so liberals that backed Truman. Who else?”
    Whitney, who had no answer, turned to the President. MacArthur, as he so often did on domestic issues, turned to Nixon, the only one among them who had Congressional experience. “Who can we get?” MacArthur asked.
    “No-one, the way this bill is written.” Nixon said. “Here’s how I see it: of the four factions in Congress, you’ll never get the South and you’ll never get the conservatives. Democratic liberals have called for repeal of Taft-Hartley since the day it was passed, so they’re on our side already. The last group is the Dewey wing. They won’t support a strong bill, but I believe they can be convinced to pass a weak one.” Then he sighed, already knowing it would be a hard sell. “If you need a name, the first one I’ll give you is Knowland.”
    “A conservative.” MacArthur said. It wasn’t a question.
    “He’s the party leader. If you get him, others will follow.” Nixon explained. “Unlike every other conservative in the Senate, he also took your side in the Bricker fight. Whatever his reason, and I think that reason is admiration, he can be convinced.”
    MacArthur made a small performance out of lighting his pipe as he came up with a plan. Finally, he made his decision. “It’s about time I visited Roosevelt’s retreat.”

    ***

    Although it had been called Shangri-La by Roosevelt, MacArthur would rename the Maryland retreat Camp Arthur after both his father and son. The fifteen-year-old Arthur took an instant liking to the place, believing it even more exciting than the White House and asking his father if they could visit again soon.
    For the elder MacArthur, it provided much more than mere excitement: it was a place where he could gather the people who would be vital to passing a labour law. Whitney and Nixon were invited, as was Knowland. Joining them would also be Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon, one of the few Republicans who had opposed Taft-Hartley. MacArthur left Nixon to facilitate the discussion, knowing his Attorney General had a better sense of what Congress would accept, asking only for “the best that can be passed.”
    By the second day of the discussions, the four men thought they had something approaching a workable bill. MacArthur had been out enjoying some time with Jean and Arthur when he was called by Knowland, who was standing on the other end of the lawn.

    “Sir, what are your plans for ‘56?” Knowland asked once MacArthur had walked over.
    MacArthur had expected to be asked anything from his experience in Japan to whether he wanted the anti-communist provisions of Taft-Hartley left in. One thing he had not expected was what he was planning to do in the election that was a little under three years away. “I… haven’t made any.” he admitted. “Why do you ask?”
    “Well, sir, I personally would like to support your efforts to improve our country.” Knowland said. “The difficulty I face in doing so is that my constituents will disagree with you on this matter, and so will most of the party. An unconditional ‘aye’ vote is a considerable risk for me and my career.”
    “And you want my endorsement for the Presidency?” MacArthur asked. There wasn’t any point talking around the matter.
    “If you wish to speak plainly, yes.” Knowland said. “And the bill we put to Congress cannot touch Section 14b. Those are my conditions.”
    Section 14b gave the states the ability to pass right-to-work laws, a point MacArthur believed did nothing but harm labour unions. Unfortunately, Nixon had made clear that attempting to repeal it would be political poison. He had decided before leaving Washington that the hated provision would stay.
    “I would prefer if you could keep this quiet for the time being, but I don’t expect to run for a second term.” As much as MacArthur enjoyed being President, he couldn’t imagine doing the job when he was eighty. Until he said so however, the threat of a second term gave him some leverage over undecided lawmakers, and he wanted to keep that threat on the table for as long as he could. “If I’m still around in ‘56, I’ll give you my endorsement.”
    “Then I believe we have a deal.” Knowland said.

    The bill that the Camp Arthur discussion, and then further discussion in the White House, eventually arrived at was far from the great restoration of labour’s rights that MacArthur had hoped for. It would not touch Section 14b, or the requirement that unions declare themselves to not be supporters of the Communist Party, or even the ability of employers to spread anti-union messages. What it did do was guarantee strikers the right to a jury trial, should they desire one, in the event of labour disputes, repealing one injustice of Taft-Hartley that unions had been vocal about since 1948.
    MacArthur returned from Camp Arthur keen to drum up public support for his new proposal, making mention of the need to give union workers a fair trial in several press conferences. Behind the scenes, the key members of MacArthur’s administration were hard at work convincing Representatives and Senators to support the bill. Republicans, especially those newly elected in 1952, were reminded that this was a key part of the President’s platform and that his failure would hurt the party in the upcoming midterms. Liberal Democrats thanked MacArthur for his efforts to further the cause they had fought for in 1948, and attempted to bring their conservative counterparts on side, an effort that was expected to be in vain but did manage to bring in a few additional votes. The rest of the conservatives, and the Congressional committees that they chaired, were sufficiently convinced by the bill’s weakness that they refrained from opposing it too strongly.
    Finally, in early June, House Speaker Martin and Majority Leader Knowland decided they had the votes that were needed. A week later, MacArthur signed the Labour Unions Act 1954 into law.

    ***

    May 20, 1954

    As soon as the operator mentioned who was on the other end of the line, Richard Nixon swore. Dealing with J Edgar Hoover was never fun. He might have been Hoover’s boss, but a lot of the time, it felt the other way around. Hoover knew where your skeletons were buried. He knew where your friends’ skeletons were buried too. There was hardly a soul in Washington he didn’t have a file on, and he made it very clear that if you crossed him, your file would be brought out, those secrets given to the press, and your career, maybe your life, would be ruined. Nixon wasn’t scared easily. Even he was intimidated by the FBI Director.

    “Good morning, Mr Nixon.” Hoover’s voice came through the telephone.
    “Good morning, Edgar.” Nixon replied, although his morning had just become that much less good. “What can I do for you?”
    “It seems I have run into a problem.” Hoover said. “Several of my agents believe that there is cause to believe that subversive elements are seeking to threaten our national security. I have tasked them with employing the usual means in which such matters are dealt with, and so far our investigations have been fruitless. Yet the signals - and these are dangerous signals indeed - they remain.”
    “Communists?” Nixon asked.
    “They could be. Left-wing elements of some kind, that my people are sure of. Allowing them to continue to operate unchecked would have… unfortunate implications for the country.” Hoover said. “Which is why I find it necessary to request the use of, shall we say, unorthodox methods to investigate this matter further. The only way we can be sure they will not cause harm to our country is if the Bureau is given expanded authority, and the final discretion, to install microphone surveillances, so that characters of suspicion may be monitored.”
    “Expanded authority?” Nixon asked, writing a note of Hoover’s request.
    “That’s correct.” Hoover confirmed. “It is the only way to protect our nation.”
    “Well, Edgar, I can take the matter to the boss.” Nixon said. “You make a strong case, and I believe he will accommodate these concerns, but as always the final decision does not lie with me.”
    “Of course.” Hoover said. “Goodbye.”

    Nixon had no intention of taking the matter to the boss. He already knew what MacArthur would say. He would say no. As far as the President was concerned, Hoover investigated far too many people for far too many things. MacArthur had needed less than ten days in office before he decided that he wanted to fire the FBI boss. The problem, that the President had explained and that his Attorney General was already well aware of, was all of Hoover’s files. Until a way to avoid them was devised, it would be too dangerous to fire him the way MacArthur might have fired a corps commander in Japan. So Nixon was told to keep Hoover happy, and preferably keep him from sticking his nose in any more lives than he already had, until someone - anyone - could think of a way to sack him without it blowing up in everybody’s faces.
    Telling Hoover not to investigate something was like telling the sun not to rise. So he gave Hoover the bullshit about asking MacArthur, safe in the knowledge that Hoover wouldn’t come back later to follow it up. If Hoover did whatever it was he wanted to do anyway, Nixon could truthfully say that he had not explicitly approved it, and that neither had MacArthur. The arrangement suited everyone fine, and it left Nixon free to keep looking for… whatever it was that they needed to break Hoover’s hold on power.

    Nixon glanced at the note he had just written, and suddenly he had an idea. Maybe this was what he was looking for all along. He decided he would discuss this with MacArthur after all.

    - BNC
     
    Part V, Chapter 40
  • CHAPTER 40

    August 1, 1954

    It was happening again. The feeling of dread never changed. Douglas MacArthur remembered all too well the terrible pre-dawn telephone calls, telling him of the catastrophe at Pearl Harbour and the invasion of South Korea. Both times, the weeks that followed had been filled with nothing but disaster. The circumstances this time were different, but only slightly: it was late evening, and the hated telephone no longer had a place in his office or his bedroom. Ned Almond was the first to hear the news.
    “Sir, the communists are shelling Quemoy.” Ned Almond said, referring to a small island off the Chinese coast that remained under the control of Chiang Kai-Shek. “Chiang’s men don’t think there’s an invasion effort.”
    MacArthur looked up from the oil and gas bill he had been reading and asked “Do we know anything else?”
    “No, sir.” Almond said.
    No, of course there isn’t. MacArthur thought. There never was. It had taken hours for any information to reach him about Pearl Harbour, and that was an American territory. Korea had been even worse. If they were anything to go by, no-one in the White House would have any idea what was going on in the Formosa Strait for the next twelve hours or more.

    Just as he had four years earlier, Almond was waiting at the door. “Any orders, sir?” he asked.
    MacArthur’s mind again went back to those last two wars. He had been forced to wait for directions from Washington, for hours, even days, while the politicians figured out what was going on and how they were going to respond. This time, he wouldn’t have to wait: he was Washington. Then he gave the idea a bit more thought: right now, no-one knew anything about what was happening on Quemoy, and it was getting late besides. A few hours might give the information time to reach his desk.
    “Call a meeting of the Joint Chiefs for 0730 tomorrow.” MacArthur said. “I want Allen and Luce there too.”

    ***

    When morning came, MacArthur’s mind had shifted only from one set of unpleasant thoughts to another. Drew Pearson had been a relentless critic of him ever since he announced his candidacy for President, and had only become more vocal since the election. Pearson reminded the country at least once a week that he had “lost Iran” to communism, and complained that he wasn’t doing enough to fulfill his civil rights promises, but the attack that galled MacArthur the most was when Pearson had called him a ‘weak leader’ for allowing his recent Labour Unions Act be watered down by Congress. MacArthur didn’t just consider himself a strong leader, he had proven it many times on the battlefield. He couldn’t ban Pearson’s “reporting” the way he had banned criticism of the occupation in Japan, but he was determined not to give Pearson any more material to attack him with. He would show strength. Only strength.

    The Joint Chiefs and the Secretaries of Defence and State were just as determined to show strength, although they were much more interested in deterring Mao than a noisy Washington journalist. The recently negotiated defence treaty with Chiang Kai-Shek demanded nothing less. Henry Luce, as longtime member and one of the leaders of the China Lobby, was the most insistent, calling for an all-out attack against Red China, the arming of the Nationalists and even atomic strikes against communist cities and military bases. MacArthur was stunned when he heard even Matthew Ridgway, now Chief of Staff of the Army, joining in the call for war. Ridgway had spent five months actually fighting the Chinese near the Korean border, and had obviously taken the decisive victory in that war as a sign that the Chinese would be easily beaten in a future conflict. Ground troops, Ridgway argued, would be the only way to prevent the Chinese from becoming more aggressive in the future.
    MacArthur thought he knew better. The Japanese had won just as convincing a victory in Korea before the turn of the century, but their subsequent invasion of China in 1937 had descended into a bloody quagmire that ultimately destroyed their empire. MacArthur had seen more of war’s tragedies than just about anyone, he did not want to be the President who lost hundreds of thousands of Americans to China’s untold masses.
    Mao would have to be confronted, that much MacArthur agreed with, but the way to do so was not to immediately begin a general war. “I have studied the Oriental mind for much of my life,” MacArthur declared, “and the mere display of force will be sufficient to force a communist retreat.”

    Overruling all of his advisors, MacArthur set out his policy for the ‘Formosa Straits Crisis’ as it would come to be called. Diplomatic channels would be used to inform the communists that if they promptly abandoned their attack on Quemoy, MacArthur was prepared to ignore the incident as the work of ‘rogue officers’. The world would meanwhile be treated to an incredible show of force that would surely impress even Drew Pearson: four aircraft carriers sailing towards Formosa, American divisions from Korea to California put on high alert, and most importantly, a fleet of atomic-capable B-47 bombers deploying on Okinawa. MacArthur sincerely hoped he would never have to use them, but if Mao insisted on pushing ahead with war, MacArthur would destroy him.

    ***

    As the world’s most dangerous game of chicken played out in the Formosa Strait, another battle was taking place within the ranks of the communist Chinese government.

    Mao Tse-tung had overruled almost every piece of advice, almost every official’s warnings, when he committed the Chinese army to the Korean War. The time, he had said then, was ripe for China to retake its true place in the world. Gone were the days of being humiliated by the Westerners. Gone were the days of unequal treaties. Driving the Americans and their UN puppets out of Korea would send a message to the world that China, under his leadership, was a force to be taken seriously once more. He had been confident of success, for his opponent was MacArthur. He had studied MacArthur’s Pacific campaigns, and come away unimpressed. His advisors had said that MacArthur was arrogant, to which he replied “Good. Arrogant, egotistical men are easy to defeat.” Then, after a brief success against the Korean troops, China’s return to the world stage was stopped cold, in the mountain wastes near the Yalu. Not by MacArthur, but by Patton, a far more capable opponent. To save face, Mao had insisted the fight go on, and it had for another five months. Then his government had turned on him and demanded he make a choice: peace or removal from office. Humiliated, he chose peace.
    Mao had been trying to recover his image, and China’s image, ever since. He had been forced to watch as Syngman Rhee purged the last significant communist holdouts in Korea. He had seen the weakling Malenkov replace the formidable Stalin, and then seen Malenkov hand over socialist East Germany to “the imperialists”. He had seen MacArthur take over from Harry Truman, and more recently seen MacArthur once again fly to Formosa, that renegade province, to negotiate an alliance with Chiang. China was being surrounded by its enemies, just like the Qing Empire had been surrounded a century earlier. That alliance between MacArthur and Chiang’s holdouts was his last chance: if he didn’t fight now, he would be staring down the barrel of another century of humiliation. His advisors (or at least the ones he still trusted) said that MacArthur would not fight: the President might have signed a treaty with Chiang (which still had yet to be ratified by the Senate), but would a man elected on a platform of peace really launch an atomic war over Quemoy?
    Mao decided to attack. If he was correct, and MacArthur backed down, he would be exonerated for the reversal in Korea. If MacArthur fought, he would not be intimidated. In Korea, it may have been that he could not push the Americans back, but neither had the Americans pushed back the Chinese. MacArthur could bomb the country, even with atomic weapons, but he was not intimidated: no matter how many MacArthur killed, there would always be more Chinese. MacArthur was as arrogant as ever: he would be weak. He would be defeated. Mao would not back down. Not again. Never again.

    Mao might not have feared MacArthur or his threat of atomic war, but the rest of his government certainly did. The People’s Republic of China was still barely five years old. It had not fully recovered from the damage of the Japanese invasion and the civil war. Industrial development in the country was still in its infancy. The army might be able to fight the Americans to a standstill with sheer numbers, but as a world power they knew that China could not yet compete. They had allowed Mao to make an initial demonstration against Quemoy in case the Americans or Chiang were prepared to simply surrender the island. If that surrender did not come, they would not fight. The communists had won the civil war not by fighting every battle, but by fighting when they could win and retreating, and conserving their forces, when they could not. Mao’s recklessness had failed the country, and the socialist cause, once already. This was the final straw. The chairman had to go.

    ***

    While the Formosa crisis raged on, MacArthur’s focus was not just on the Chinese, but also on the upcoming midterm elections. The Republicans had only the slimmest of majorities in Congress, and it had inhibited his program several times. His efforts to reform labour rights had been reduced to a pathetically weak bill. His civil rights bill had been filibustered to defeat. The one true domestic success he had was defeating the Bricker Amendment, and that had come down to the last vote. If he was to pass the rest of his program, he would need more Republicans in the 84th Congress. With less than three months before the elections, his best hope at getting those Republicans into the House and Senate would be a victory in Asia. He had said that his foreign policy would place Asia first. Everyone would be watching to see just what that meant.
    In late August, they would find out. A clique of Chinese officials toppled Mao, with Liu Shaoqi, a senior government official, taking his place. Mao had refused to even entertain the notion of a negotiated end to the crisis, Liu was eager to restore peace to the region. Henry Luce was put on the telephone to Peking to reach an agreement. Liu said he would call off the bombardments if the Nationalists removed their troops from the islands. Quemoy would remain under Chiang’s control. Luce asked MacArthur if that was acceptable. MacArthur said that it was. The following day, the papers ran ‘PEACE IN CHINA’ as the front page headline. Even Drew Pearson couldn’t find a way to criticise the President for his handling of the crisis.

    Then attention shifted from China to its southern neighbour.

    Following the French withdrawal from Vietnam, the communist Vietminh had been slowly but surely winning the civil war that raged through the country. In the autumn of 1953, they had seized the old capital of Hue, and promptly massacred thousands of its inhabitants, an atrocity so terrible that it overshadowed even the taking of Hanoi the following January. The pro-Western Emperor Bao Dai had set up his administration in the southern city of Saigon, where he called out for aid as his remaining followers found themselves pushed into an ever smaller part of the country. MacArthur, seeing that the cause was lost, had refused to spend a cent on anything other than evacuating French, American and other officials. He had hoped that the Emperor would hold out until after the midterms, and when the massacre at Hue inspired thousands to join what was now being called the Loyalist armies, it briefly looked like he might. As September began, the frontlines (at least when there were frontlines, a rarity in that war), had still been thirty miles from the city.
    The dam broke on September 15th. The Vietminh had broken through. MacArthur ordered the carrier Tarawa, fresh from its mission in the Formosa Strait, to rush to the South China Sea and evacuate Bao Dai and his government by helicopter. They escaped just in time: on September 20th, the red flag with a gold star flew over Norodom Palace.
    Drew Pearson saw this as yet another opportunity to lambast the President. MacArthur wasn’t just the man who “lost Iran”, but now he had “lost Vietnam” as well. When the midterms came in November, it was these failures, and not the successes in Germany and China, that the voters remembered. The Democrats gained a seat in the Senate, giving them a 49-47 majority, and managed to take a small majority in the House as well.

    The President saw not defeat in the midterm results, but opportunity. As he had no re-election campaign to consider, he was now free to act without fear of consequence. Drew Pearson might not have realised it, but Douglas MacArthur had just become more powerful than ever before.

    END OF PART V

    - BNC
     
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